Music Production in Ableton Live: Learn How to Produce Music in Any Genre

1. Introduction to Producing and Arranging Music: Producing is the art of bringing a piece of music to life. It's through the process of producing that you can bring the same song into completely different worlds. Type type. In this class, you'll learn song structure, as well as the different approaches for producing a song. We'll cover advanced production techniques like contrast and layering to make sure that your song is breathtaking all the way through. Producing and arranging is the difference of having an acoustic ballad version of a song to having an EDM Dance Hall banger version of the same song. I'm Benza Maman. I have a degree in music composition, and I've been working behind the scenes in the music industry since 2010. I've written and produced songs for countless artists, and I've had the privilege to work with the writers and producers of artists like Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney, Luke Combs, and Many More. Recently, I've even gotten millions of streams, views, and some viral videos of my own. And I can't wait to share this decade of knowledge with you. Amazing production can completely change a piece of music, and we'll show you how you can have an 80s synth version of a song. Or an orchestral version of the same song and vice versa. And just by producing a song differently can be the difference from a mediocre song to a hit song. This class is designed to equip you with the tools and knowledge to take your music to the next level. Whether you're just starting out or trying to refine your skills, I'm here to guide you every step of the way. And don't worry. We'll keep it engaging and straightforward with plenty of practical tips that you can apply right away. I use Ableton Live, but the tools and techniques that I teach in this class can be applied to any music production software. The assignment for this class is to follow along and produce a song of your very own. So if you're ready to burst open the doors of music production, then let's dive right in and get started. 2. Basic Song Structure: Welcome to the arranging and producing chapter. This is where we put everything we've learned together and make our own songs. So without further ado, let's jump right in. We'll start with talking about basic song structure. AB is the most basic and most common structure across genre and time. From classical music to pop music to EDM. In Pop, you'll have verse chorus. A B. In EDM, you classically have Build Drop. You can have A B A B, which is verse chorus verse chorus or Build Drop Build. If you have two sections, you have a song. So in songwriting, if you have two melodies, you have a song because one melody would be your verse. Another melody would be your chorus. There we suddenly have a piece of music because you can go verse Chorus verse Chorus and you can end it if you want to. So, it's important to start wrapping your head around structure to know if you have an idea, you have part of a song. Where does it want to go? What else do you want it to do? And sometimes I have had parts of songs where I only have one part, and I can't really figure out what the next part wants to beat. That's totally fine if you only have one part, and you just can't figure out what that next part wants to beat. You know? Sometimes You might just need one part. I don't know. There's all these rules are meant to be broken. But other times you might just have a part of a song, and you just got to let it chill for a little while, 'cause I've had songs like that where I'm like, Whoa, this really, really cool part, this one melody, this one part, and I just can't find another part for it. And I just kind of let it chill, and then I come back to it later, and then another part presents itself. So sometimes that's the case. That's no big deal. With music, it's really important to just keep continuously creating, continually making new things so that you don't ever get too precious and too stuck on one idea. Song structure, takes a while to get integrated into you, but soon it'll just be visceral. You'll just know it. You'll just feel it. And when soon as you start paying attention to structure, when you listen to music, it'll seep into your own music creation. So just like with everything, I highly recommend that every time you listen to a song, try to be aware of the structure. You know, what parts are happening? Is it verse chorus verse chorus? Is it Bilrop, build drop? Is it some unique version? Because some songs will have a unique twist to it. They'll be a verse, a chorus, and then some other part, and then another verse and a chorus, and then maybe, like, a bridge. And so the more you start paying attention to these things, the more you have to pull from your musical tool belt, because when you're inspired and you're writing, the more of these song structures that are in your head, you'll be able to be like, Okay, well, you know, Daf Punk did this kind of extra part in three quarters through their song that I really liked, and my song is maybe similar or maybe not similar to theirs, but maybe I'm going to try that idea on my song. And that kind of thinking and combining different kinds of genres is exactly what you should be doing. 3. Advanced Song Structure: Now, let's talk about advanced song structure. So basic song structure, A, B, two different parts that might repeat on themselves. Advanced song structure embellishes on that pattern. The classic pop formula is verse chorus verse chorus Bridge Chorus. That's the classic tried and true formula for a pop song. Another way of looking at that could be A, B, verse chorus, A, B, verse chorus, C B. Bridge chorus. But that's a little confusing with C being chorus and B being bridge. And so you can think of these however you want, and whatever symbols you're using to remember these patterns by, just maintain some consistency, so you don't get confused. Modern pop music has embellished on the verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus, because most modern pop songs have something called a pre chorus. It goes verse, pre chorus chorus. And then that usually repeats verse, pre chorus chorus, and then you can do a bridge chorus, or sometimes you'll just do another pre chorus and a chorus, meaning it would be verse, pre chorus, chorus, verse, pre chorus, chorus, Pre chorus. Chorus. And there you go. So a whole song. Songs are actually getting a little bit shorter these days, and sometimes you'll see that pattern happening. There's really no right or wrong way to do this. But what a pre chorus usually is. It's a section that sort of tends to rise up into the chorus. So it's a repetitive part where you are starting to get that sing along that familiar feeling, and then it launches into the chorus, where hopefully you're singing and dancing or whatever the song is intending for you to do. Not only is there pre chorus, but there is also such a thing as a post chorus. Now, we'll listen to a couple examples of what this might be. You can call this post chorus a Jam or a chorus B or whatever makes sense to you. I call it a post chorus, but the terminology is not as important as really understanding what it is. So let's go ahead and listen to some of these examples. So, here is Summer Breeze. This is an older song and it has a great post chorus. See the curtains hanging in the window in the evening over fading Little lad shining through the window. Let me know everything. Some of the makes me feel rough the Jasmine Some of the makes me feel fine. Come and as in my mind Cs pos. So, their post chorus is what actually starts the whole song, which is this really cool instrumental hook or this instrumental lead. So they use that to begin the song, and then it happens after their chorus. So it's the song structure leads into this really cool musical moment. Here is a different example of a post chorus. Oh, go. Lucky, ducky girl. She got married to a boy. Thank you. She'd kick you out if she ever ever knew. About You tell me that you do. You know everyone is talking on the scene. I hear them whispering about the place. Do your pin. And how you don't know how to keep your business clean. Bobby now he's getting hop. At the body shop. Do something go home. He stepped back while he's draping. She put it. She put it down W go, we go. He left his kids out. W go, we go. So he can get bad up the buy Doing on So however this section hits you or however the section in that last song hits you, what I'm trying to point out is that there is a chorus moment. And then there's a secondary part here. And in the first example, it was a musical part that happened completely after the chorus section leading into the second f this song, it's a vocal part that seems more integrated in the chorus itself, but it's almost like a part to the chorus with this different melody that comes in that then they tie up with the original melody of the chorus. So in this song, it's more integrated, and there's certainly an argument to say that that's just the chorus, but it's clearly a distinct and different part. There are solos and instrumental breaks that can happen in virtually any genre. The classic rock era had all those great guitar solos. Now in this new sort of Indie rock rock era. We're hearing more guitar solos coming back. You can have instrumental breaks, and you could have an argument that that's what happens in summer breeze, whatever you want to call it. You can go ahead and listen to the song Get Lucky by Daf Punk because they have a lot of different interesting sections to their songs, and it's actually a very complicated song. Let's go ahead and listen to the song, Get Lucky by Daf Punk and analyze, what are the different sections that we hear there. We have this Jam intro, little solo. We have this Other Different feeling intrumental, heart. Like the legend of the thing. Corus A ends with beginning. What keeps the planet sending? Uh the force of beginning. Lo, the pre Corus. Comes to far to give A. Who we are. Is the bu go to the s course. She's a fond ng to the son. And my fon neck to get song. She's a fond ng for good fun. And my pon neck to get lucky. We're pon n to the son. We're pon neck to get song. We're pon neck for good fun. We're Fon neck to get lucky. We're Fon next to get ho. We're fond neck to get lucky. We're Fon neck to get lucky. We're pon neck to get lucky. L instrument amber. The present has no giving hers. Your gift keeps some given. What is just some feeling? You want to leave I'm wing. Ah. We come to far to get back. Who we are. So as the far to the s She's a fun night to the son. And a fun night to get song. She's a fun night for good fun. And a fun night to get lucky. We're a fun night to the sun. We're a fun night to get s. We were a fun night for good fun. We we fun night to get lucky. We're f to get lucky. Fon night to get lucky. We're Fon night to get lucky. We're Fon night to get lucky. She's a fun night of the sun. Fun night to get some. She's a fun night course. It's fun. I'm a fon night to get lucky. We Fon night of the sun. We on night to get some. We Fon night for good fun. We're Fon night to get lucky. Were Fon night to get us. We Fon night to get lucky. We fon night to get lucky. We're Fon night to get lucky. She's a fun night to the sun. I my phone night to get s's a fond night for good fun. And my phone n to get lucky. We pon night to the sun. Pon n to get song. We fun night for good fun. We fond ne to get the lucky. We fond to get lucky. We fond n to get lucky fond to get lucky. But fond to get lucky. Rot thanks again. F. Pos Cy thanks again, dam. Bot thanks again. Bot thanks again. And you can go ahead and listen to the rest of the song on your own if you want to. But it's helpful to listen to music this way, where every new section, you're assigning it some sort of label in your head. And whatever that label is, is not important, but just so that you can understand. Okay, this is a section, and now, like this new part is sort of a different section, even though it might feel seamlessly integrated. And of course, your song wants to feel seamlessly integrated. This is a pretty complicated piece. We had that summer Breeze song, which had an instrumental jam after the chorus. We had unholy, which had a chorus, A part, a different kind of melody, and then it went back to their chorus. And this sort of has both, where it has a chorus Then it has a different kind of melody, and then it has an instrumental jam part. So it's interesting to hear how these different songs are formed at all the different parts that make up their songs. Some pop songs now have very different melodies for each verse and less predictable structures, but usually a repeating chorus. Classically verse melodies were the same, and they would repeat. But since the hip hop and rap era, verses now can be very different, and sometimes that's really, really cool and engaging and seems not repetitive. So pop music is classically a very repetitive form of music. And today, it's becoming less and less so. But usually, the core repeating, sing along, feeling chorus seems to be something that is standing the tests of time. But it's important to experiment, too, learn what all these structures are, and then break all the rules and try writing something that's completely anti structure. And see what that feels like, and what that sounds like. Labels are important. However things make sense to you is the right answer. I have the different things that I call it, but what's important is that you just assign some meaning, some feelings, some value to these different sections that you're hearing in these songs and understand how the song is being created. If you perceive music completely different than I do, that's totally fine, as long as you're able to somehow absorb the structures that you're hearing so that you can output those in your own music. Again, analyze, play, sing, recreate your favorite songs, cover them. Learn how they feel, learn how they're structured to help you understand why you like them. The more you play and recreate and analyze your favorite songs, the more you'll start making music like that, because when you're in the moment trying to make a decision of Next, you'll pull from all your past knowledge. You'll pull from unholy. You'll be like, You know what? Now, in my chorus in my song, I want to do that little B part thing, and then you'll think of summer breeze, and you'll be like, and then after that, let's do a little instrumental part, and then you'll think of get lucky, and you'll do, I want to do a pre chorus that soars up high and then goes down into the chorus. The more you have floating around your subconscious and your conscious, the more you'll pull that into your own music. 4. Contrast The Structure of a Beat: Drama makes a good story, and music is storytelling. And the most drama you can create musically is through contrast. So, in music, we use contrast to tell a compelling story. We love contrast. We have a build, which is tension rising and a drop. Tension released. That's the most simple example of contrast that I can think of, and a whole genre of dance music that just uses builds and drops, tension rising, and tension releasing. This is the best example of contrast. You can also have a big full chorus with a pared down verse. This is also contrast. Contrast is most apparent, usually in the music itself. Yes, you can have a lot of voices and singing louder on a chorus and then singing quieter on a verse. And that's necessary to do. But really, having the drums just break down and hold off for a section. That's a lot of contrast. Having the drums doing a sort of building rhythm and then going into a regular beat, having your bass drop out for a section. These musical changes are very, very parent, especially if you have a groove that carries through most of the song, every time you do a little breakdown, a change up. This really calls to the ear and tells a listener, Oh, this is a different kind of a section. So Musical contrast in the beat in the production is super super important. Of course, your chorus might have more instruments and more layers, and as the song goes on, they probably should. So your music will be increasingly full and increasingly layered as the music goes on. It starts off a little bit more bare bones, and then the end, we have the whole kitchen sink and the whole orchestra, and the whole town is singing the last chorus together. Something really interesting in modern rap music is you'll have the full beat of your drums, your 80 weights, and your harmony part, whatever that is. And they're usually constantly playing with adding and subtracting the different elements so that every time a new element comes in, another element's pulling out, and you're continually getting that feeling of satisfaction of that feeling of, like, the beats dropping because a new element is constantly coming in. But what's so clever about rap beat production is that a new element comes in and you take another element out. So not only are you feeling like, Oh, yeah, like, the drums are back or the bass is back or the melodies back. But then when you're satisfied that that elements back, a new element has been removed. So they're creating a continual loop of giving you what you want to hear, because it was just missing, and that can keep going because you keep pulling out a different element. I'll show you what I mean, but this is a really good and simple way to create a lot of contrast and a lot of good storytelling with not that many elements. Ds and drops are obviously very musically different. So when you think about contrast, you want to think about full to empty, Energetic to relaxing, tension to release, or even just harmonically dissonant to consonant. You just want to think of wherever your song is, if it's empty, if it's full, if it's fast, if it's slow, if there's some dissonant chord, wherever you are, do the contrasting thing next for your next section, and that will probably feel like a lot of payoff. So we'll analyze the beat for this post Malone song. Intro guitars. You probably think that you are better now. Batter and now. You only say that cousin not around. No around. You know I never a ect you down. Lecture down. I would have gave you anything? Would have gave you everything? You know I said that better now. Better now. I only say that cousin Dt of Brown. Do brown. You know I never at to let you down. Let you down. Would have gave you anything. Would have gave you everything. Wow. I did not believe that. Everything came second to the bed saw. You're not even speaking to my friends. No. You knew my uncle and my aunts. Swy camels back didn't open your eyes. We were looking forward to the rest of our lives. Used to keep my pitch posing by your bedside. Now I see dress The sax like I'm rolling rolling R. Quill brothers, L Jos J. Drinking, I'm trying to forget. But I can't get this out on my head. You probably think that you are heating do batting out. So, you can see in that song, it's a pretty simple tactic of just giving you the full beat and then taking it away and then giving it back and then taking it away and then giving it back. And that's a pretty effective way of continually creating contrast, as long as it's not boring doing the same elements over and over, and in that song, it's not. It keeps sounding good. So contrast doesn't have to be Oh, I'm gonna come up completely new beat and a completely new part next. It can just be like, Oh, drums are in. Now, drums are out. You know, Bases in. Base is out. It can be simple like that. And those moves still have a big impact on your song. So, as with everything, I encourage you to listen to your favorite songs and try to understand what are the structures for music happening. What's happening in the song? You know, Is it diverse or a chorus or whatever? And then what's happening in the beat? Is it full? Is it empty, or the drums in or the drums out? What kind of genre are you working on? Is it a folk song that has, like, just guitar in the verse and then a full band in the chorus or? How is the music changing throughout your songs? 5. History of Music Production: Back in the day, you would have an artist or a band would come in to a music studio, and they would record themselves. The music producer would be somebody who used to get paid a salary by the record label to just be present in the studio and be there when the artist comes to record. There would be engineers who would get the microphones and set all the analog gear ready. And the producer was just kind of a redundancy role just to oversee the operation of everything. Eventually, music production started to come into its own during the time of the Beatles with the producer George Martin. What was happening is suddenly with the ability to record and then re record and record on top of yourself, you weren't just recording a band. It wasn't like a singer would come in, sing, and then leave, and then that was the whole song. Suddenly, there was, the band can play part of the song. Then you can do part of the vocals, and then you could bring in an orchestra or something else or other musicians and record those on top of what you already recorded at a different time. You could spend some time to try and get some trippy or psychedelic effects or other worldly sounds. And suddenly music production started to come into its own as a way to not simply record what the artist or what the band was playing, but to also create a sonic landscape of its own and use the studio as an instrument. What happened during the era of the Beatles was George Martin was the producer for the Beatles. And he was just getting paid a salary by the record label, and he wasn't getting paid very much. The Beatles were making tons of money because they were the most popular band in the world. And George Martin decided to quit. He said, I am going to walk away from this if you, you being the record label doesn't want to pay me more. I'm out of here. And the Beatles loved their producer, and they refused to work with any other producer. And so the label was forced to bring George Martin back as a contractor at his own rate. And that has been the model ever since for music producers as a important role, not just a office manager, but really as a creative partner, for the artists. During this era, you would have had a analog board, which is probably, like, the classic music studio, like, board with all those knobs that you might have seen like next to, like, a glass window. You would have had a board. You would have had a team of engineers. You would have had microphone specialists who know all the different microphones. There would have been people working analog compressors and reverbs. There would be a whole team in the studio making the recording come to life. As time goes on and technology advanced, a lot of those roles started falling onto the producer who started being able to do all of those different jobs. In the Hayday, you could have an actual entire orchestra and a bunch of session players on top of all the jobs I mentioned, all collaborating together real people making music. If you fast forward to 2023, oftentimes you have one music producer who is doing everything in the music production process. And sometimes that producer is also even the artist. So you have an artist who's writing their songs, producing the beat, playing all the parts, mixing and mastering, doing all the technical stuff, and there's just one person behind the music that you're hearing. Obviously, there are benefits and downfalls for the way that things have gone. But it's important to know why things are the way they are, because that affects how we make music today. So, I just wanted to give you guys a little bit of history before we keep going in this course so you can understand where music production came from to hopefully help you understand where music production is going. 6. History of Music Production Part 2: Are two fundamentally different roads to go down with music production. Back in the day in the Beatle era and before, it was generally song first. Now, what this means is that a songwriter or a band wrote a song, and then they came to the studio to record that song. So essentially, the song would be written first, and even as music production started coming into its own during that era in the 1960s, still there was always a song to begin with. A song would be written, and then you would come to the studio, you would talk with the producer, you would talk with the other band members and the other musicians and you would figure out how to best make that song come to life. When you have the song first, it's all about just making the music support the song. In modern times, it's largely switched to being Beat first. This means a lot of producers make a lot of beats and then shop those two songwriters to artists and top line writers. So a lot of the music, the beat is already made, and then the lyrics and the song is written to the Beat. So those are the fundamentally two different roads that you can go down. Song first being, Okay, I have the song. I have the melody. I have the lyrics. What are the best chords to support those? What is the best that we can do musically to support the song? Versus, Okay, we have the beat. What is the best song we can write to that beat? So when you're making music, you can decide which of these routes supports your creative process the best. Maybe you're someone who wants to write the music first, maybe you're a producer who wants to make a beat and have someone else write a song to it, or maybe you're more of a songwriter, and you want to produce your songs, and you want to support the songs that you're writing. Either way, music production works the same way, the craft of music production, how do you make the music come to life? All of that stays the same. It's just the fundamental starting point. Do you have something that you're already producing for, or are you just starting some music from scratch, and you're going to write the top line last? 7. Song Anatomy: The Parts That Make Up a Song: Talk about the parts that make up a song. No matter what the genre, there's generally the same parts that make up every single song. The easiest and best analogy for this is to look at the classic rock band, just because it's pretty easy for us to visualize. You have drums, which are made up of a kick, snare, high hats, and cymbals. You have bass, you have guitar or piano or keyboards or synths, and you have vocals. These elements fill up the spectrum, essentially harmony, melody, and rhythm. You can break down music into melody, harmony, and rhythm, being the entire spectrum that is music. Whether you make EDM music, which will still have drums based, maybe synths and vocals, or you're a rock band that'll have drums based guitar and vocals, it's still the same categories that exist to make your song. You can have music like orchestra music, which focuses more on harmony and a little bit less on rhythm, but there's still rhythm. There's still some drums, usually sparsely, more so in cinematic music. But no matter what you're doing, you're going to have these same categories. So we have the drums, which is the rhythm section. We have the bass, which is the lowest note in the harmony. We have the what I call the Harmony part, which is either going to be your guitars, your pianos, your harmony vocals, if there's a choir or your synths. And then you have your vocals or your top line or your lead melody. Between all of these parts, you can basically create every song that you've ever heard. And in the following chapters of this course, we're going to go through and dissect each of these categories and figure out how to best create the drums for whatever genre you're working on, the bass part, the Harmony part, guitars, pianos, synths, or other instruments, and vocals, the lead melody of your music. 8. Song First: Crafting Cohesive Musical Narratives: Know how to make a baseline. You know how to make some drums. You know how to make a harmony part. You know how to make a melody. You know how to structure a song. But what do you start with? You could start at any of those different points. So let's go back to the two main basic ways to start a song. The two camps are song first or Beat first. So in this lesson, we'll explore Song first. So in the song first method, you already have a roadmap. You have your song. This will be the natural way to make music for singer songwriters who probably write a song on guitar or piano or just vocally or whatever, but they write a song first, and then they add the music. So once the song is done, then they'll start turning on their producer mind and be like, Okay, well, maybe to or to temp track, the Natson Music, drums, bass, sins, whatever. And with this approach, it's easier to add elements just as needed to emphasize the emotion or vision of the song. After the temp track, I usually add drums, bass, harmony, and then finally re record the vocal. So what this means is I will lay down a scratch vocal with a scratch piano track just to get something into Ableton, and from there I can start adding the other parts, and then at the end, I will re record the vocal. You don't have to work in this way, but this method works well Sometimes the original guitar or piano part that you recorded to support the scratch track to support your first vocal isn't the best thing for your produced song. Sometimes it is, and you're like, Okay, you had the perfect piano part, and boom it's done. But sometimes you realize the part you were playing on the piano was maybe a little bit basic, and now that you have some other elements in there, you might change that part. And that's totally okay. I urge you not to be too precious and too attached to the earliest ideas because staying flexible often allows you to end up with the best final result. Even if it means you're changing a core part of the song near the end. If that's what the song needs, it's important to listen to those instincts. Maybe you write songs, but then you bring them to a band. And the band will help figure out the best way to play this. Sometimes the players themselves will just come up with their own parts, and then you don't have to do as much. Or sometimes you can help the band find the best way to tell the story with good contrast and interesting musical parts. Then once the band is well practiced, you can record and add any extra layers if needed. It's always worth taking the time to get a good performance because capturing a good performance ultimately will sound better and take less time, be less frustrating than trying to overproduce and fix a mediocre performance. So, let's walk through the steps of me turning one of my songs into a production. So here I have a song that I've written on the piano. The city don't sleep. Everybody buzzing on some kind of cafe, running late to a shift or important eating, driving fast, so the lights burs softly softly. The city don't sleep. Everybody rallies to the party. Drinking this anxiety or scroll so the eyes bur softly, softly. So I won't go and sing the whole song, but I have a song that I've written on the piano. The first step would be to find what tempo is that song. So there's several ways you can do this. I usually turn on the metronome, and I'm like, Okay, D. And I try to tap along to get to the right tempo. And I found that tapping along got me around 80. I was like 82. Sometimes you want to leave it exactly how you tapped it, but sometimes you just want to bring it to a nice even number. And we'll see if this feels good for the song now that you've decided at Tempo. Try to sing it. The city don't sleep. Everybody buzzing on some kind of calving, running late to a shift zone for driving fast so the lights buzz softly softly. So, that sounds pretty good. I know that I have kind of a faster sort of trap in mind for this song. So because those kinds of beats tend to be halftime, eighty's cool, but to get 80 at a half time feel, you really want to be at 160, which will give you a faster metronome. The city dot sleep. Everybody buzzing on some kind of cafe, running late to shift port Ra fast the lights blow softly softly. And that sounds good to me, and I like having the metronome at that speed. Of course, you could be at 80 and change the pace of the metronome here to eighth notes instead of quarter notes. It's totally up to you. So what I did next was record a scratch track of the piano. So, I in my head, am singing the song and just playing the piano part. I've played the whole entire song, and then I recorded a scratch track of the vocal. Now, I recorded several different takes of the vocal. And I decided that this take here layered with this take for the chorus. That sounds fine enough to keep going building the song, because I will record the final vocal at the end. I got a piano part down. I got a vocal part down. And the next thing that I did is I pulled up this drum rack here. This is the Vintage funky Good T. So I had this drum rack, and I went ahead and played a beat along to the scratch piano and vocal track to just get some ideas out of what the drum part might want to be. The city don't sleep. Everybody rallies to the party. Drinking just to nu their anxiety. Or scroll until their eyes blow softly. Soy. But I'm the one. He's crazy. I'm the one. They don't understand. Next, I have some rough parts together. And what I'm going to go ahead and do is start tweaking the performance of the piano part to really make sure that everything's kind of hitting in time. It's time to start locking in one part. I don't want a bunch of really loose parts here. I want to start locking in. Okay, this is my piano part. This is my drum part. So we have this piano part, and I decided that with this one chord here, the single note hits on the second beat of the empty bar, and then the fourth chord comes again onto the beat. So I decided this is the general pattern it should be I like the live feel. I want it to be in time. You can go ahead and mess with the velocities. If you maybe this one note, you're like, I don't want that velocity to be so low. You can rise that up. You don't want to mess with the chance, you can turn off the chance, and just align things just to make sure that your part is the way you want it to. And I will come through the entire part of the whole song. And just make sure that every hit hits well, and every note plays well, and it's how I want it to be. The longer I take to get a good take, like if it's like, Okay, let's record the piano again, and let's do it again. The more I practice and get a really good take, the less tweaking I really have to do. But I personally, I do like to go through and comb through every single note and make sure that everything's hitting well, and maybe that sounds overwhelming, but if your songs like two or 3 minutes, it's really not going to take that long. So then I have my piano part, just how I want it. I ended up changing the piano part a lot throughout the production of the song. But at this stage, I had how I liked it. I then went in and started tweaking my drum part. To try and get that to be more how I wanted it. I lined up the hits differently. I chose some different sounds. And then what I did is I separated the kick and snare and the high hats so that I had more control over each part. Tough. The city don't sleep. Everybody rallies like two of the party. Sien on their anxiety. Or scroll until their eyes burn softly. Toughy. But I'm the one. So let's listen to these drums. You have this kick? Snare. It's going to this rever kind of a lot, which is cool. Hi, hats. And we can see that these high hats are actually some custom high hats from a drum rack. Because I didn't quite like the high hats that they had in this drum kit. Next thing I did is I pulled up a bass sound. I used Trillion because I love trillion. And I played a bass part along to the drums, piano, and vocal. The drabing fast so the lights blows so Soffe The city don't sleep. Everybody rallies like to the pop. So I have sometimes these little base fills that come in in these pockets. Boy scroll until their eyes be softly softly. But I'm the one who's crazy. I'm the one. They don't understand. This is where I feel happy with grass and my fea So now I've played a bass part through the whole song, and I have my drums. I have my bass. I have my harmony part, and I have my melody. So I actually have a complete song at this point. I went in and added some harmony parts to the vocal, some doubles. I even recorded some choir part to the chorus. And the choir does have a tremolo on it. I have. That part sounds a little out of tune, but that's exactly where I am in the song. So we have our drums. We have our bass. We have our vocal. We have our Harmony part, which is the piano. And in addition to the piano, we have some harmony vocals that are acting as a choir, which is a new element in the background. Where I feel grass break the cycle, break Changes in. Next up, now that I have all the basic elements that make a song, I re recorded the lead vocal to really try and figure out what I wanted to sound like. I made a comp of the best takes. I have some harmonies that come in, some doubles that come in. And we really took the time to get the journey of the lead vocal with the harmonies in the doubles to sound exciting and compelling and to evolve and change throughout the song. So now I have my lead vocal that is processed with my vocal chain, going to some delays in reverbs. I had the other parts going to reverbs. I have a sub part to the base. All the base notes are lined up, so that performance is it's not quantized, but it is quantized almost by hand, just like I did everything else to make sure that everything is hitting where it should be hitting, but still has that organic eb and flow. Now it's time to print all of these elements down and mix them. So I printed all the parts down into audio file so that I could go ahead and mix them. But because I am a producer and a mixer, I kept changing the production throughout the mixing process. We'll do a whole lesson on mixing, so don't worry about that right now. But this is essentially the result that we ended up with. Sleep. Everybody buzzing on some kind of cafe. Running late two shifts or important meeting. Driving fast so the lights blur softly. Softly. The city don't sleep. Everybody rallies late to the party. Drinking to some noun their anxiety. Or scroll until their eyes blur softly softly. So, this song really just is the piano, some drums, bass, and vocals. And we have some layers of vocals coming in and out. That basically makes the whole song. The chorus has some background vocals in there, and I have a guitar part, but it's pretty simple song. And that's all you need to make something sound full and complete is just have drums, bass, Harmony and melody. There you go. That's a song If you are approaching producing music song first, you have the song, you could take a similar approach. You can approach this really in any way that you want, but if you're a little overwhelmed, and you don't know how to start, go ahead and lay down a scratch track of your vocal and a scratch track of whatever instrument you used to write the song. If you didn't use an instrument, that's even easier. But once you have those scratch tracks down, you just start adding another element. And I like to get the drums in pretty early and do the basse last just because the drums really help me center everything else. And the base for me is the most supporting role. So whatever's going on in the song, I don't want the bass to step on the lead vocal or anything else important. I just want the base to enhance the groove and enhance the harmony. So for me, I do bass last. And I'll do drums pretty early, and I usually write songs on the piano or guitar. So that's how I like to work. Once you have recorded your scratch tracks, then you've got to go through the tedious work of locking in your parts. If you did play it live, then you're going to have to, you know, tweak the performance probably so that it's a little bit more refined. If you programmed your part, you might go through the opposite process of trying to things a little bit off the grid and change your velocities a little bit or find that really perfect groove to give your song that live feel. So it depends what you're going for. This song is kind of like a live band sort of feeling of a song, so it does want more of that live performance feel, so that's why I played everything in. There are some songs that I will program things in, even though I can play them in. I choose to program because it's more of that vibe. And that's a subjective choice, and as you get comfortable producing, you'll start knowing which approach you want to take. And sometimes you take an approach, and you're like, After I played that whole thing in, I'm just going to go and produce it. And that happens, and that's totally fine. There are no guaranteed right or wrong ways to go about this, and you can just start exploring how you want to bring your songs to life. 9. Writing a Song: The Art of Melodic Storytelling: Let's write a quick song together because you can't go for the Song first approach if you don't have a song. Let's write a quick song. Writing a song. Well, there's Lyrics first or Mel first, essentially. Lyrics first, for example, Elton John had a songwriting partner who literally handed him poems that were the lyrics. And then Elton John then sat down at the piano and turned them into song. The Beatles Title first or theme first. They were quoted as saying, once you have a title, you have a song. So I think one of their taxi drivers said, I'm working eight days a week, and then, of course, the Beatles heard eight days a week, and then they were able to turn that concept into a hit song of their time. You could also write melody first. Sometimes a melody pops into my head, and I can turn that into a song. And I know a lot of people who are sort of melody first can vibe out some melodies, and then they might, put some structure and meaning to it after. You could obviously do the instrument first. Most singer songwriters do play an instrument, and they might start by finding some chords on the piano or the guitar that evoke a certain emotion, and then they start writing on top of that. I usually write down songs on the piano. I will sit and play free form until I find something interesting that really makes me feel something. And then I'll see where that wants to go. So a good place to start is just by playing four chords and just see how that works. And then, of course, if you can come up with something more unique and more interesting than a classic four chord song, all the better to you. But it's nothing's wrong with just playing some four chords that give you an emotion and start writing a song I will start singing and see if any melodies come. See what feels good to sing over what I'm playing. Once I have some melodies, then I start adding words. Once I have a theme, then I will rewrite the music and the melodies to fit the theme of the song. And then sometimes once I've found the theme, I might rewrite the music and the melodies to fit the theme of the song. Or sometimes as I'm finding the lyrics and the melodies, I'm finding the theme, and it's already cohesive. So let's go ahead and write a song together, and this is how I usually go about it because I play the piano. I'll just try to find some chords. And to me, I'm like, Okay, I feel that. What I'm playing is the minor one. Then I'm playing the minor seven, which is a major chord built off the seven of the key, I mean. So if I'm in the key of G, and I play a G minor, then I play an F major. Then I play a C major. And the C major is the major four and a minor key, which is technically out of key, but gives it a really epic kind of sound. And now I'll just see if any melodies show up. You'll hear. Mm here. Oh And then I might just start freestyling, and see if anything comes through. Oh. He. Oh. The other day, you called me telling me that you don't want to see me. And I said, That's fine. And I cried when you left, but there's nothing that I don't. I know I'm fine. So I often will do something like that where I try to mind my own life, like something that happened, but I keep trying to freestyle, and I'm not that good at freestyling. So not all of the lyrics and things I say actually even make sense. Like, some of them, some of them are cohesive, and some of them are just gibberish. And sometimes it feels nice to just do that. So I just might do that for like 20 minutes. Sometimes I do it for a really long time and there is a diminishing return, especially if you're like going to record this and listen back to it. You don't want it to be too long. But it's good to just jam, let your feelings out let your thoughts out, and then you know, maybe take a break and come back and be like, Okay, I like that first line. Like, you called me, told me you didn't want to see me. I'm like, Okay, that feels nice kind of for these chords. And I might then Keep going down that direction. So I would maybe let's say I like that melody, and I would keep that melody going. And I'm like, Okay, but the first thing I was doing, I was humming a different melody. So let's see here if there's two melodies, because remember, two melodies, make a song. Last week, called me. Told me you don't want to see me, and I said, That's fine. Oh And I ran ten K. Try to get you out of Monday. But I I'm blind. And so and so Co tonight. Oh Oh. And then like, Okay, normally, I would keep going, keep trying to write something that felt a little bit better, maybe a little bit of a better melody or something, but for the purposes of this lesson, let's say you're like, Okay, we basically have two melodies going. We have that first kind of talking melody, and then we have that more like, Oh, kind of thing going on. And here is where I would go into lyric mode, where I would try to really find what is the core of this song. What is the point of this So, call me didn't want to see me. That's something that's true in my own personal life with an of mine. So I'm like, Okay, maybe this song is about that relationship. And then maybe I want to kind of mind that relationship for that song. And that's a perfectly great place to write something authentic to you. So you can keep writing some words down. This is really where I go into the notes to have my phone. I'm like, Okay, you called, last week, you called, then you said you didn't want to see me. And then I said, that's fine. Maybe I want to keep the I said that's fine, and I want to write some more lyrics. So it would be like, last week, you called and said, you don't want to see me. So then maybe I want to keep that cadence. And then I could say that day, it called fall fall Crow. Well, there's where you spend some time saying, Okay, maybe you want to keep that cadence. And if I were actually writing some lyrics, this is the slowest part for me, is the actual writing of lyrics. So it takes me a lot of time to figure out what I want to say. But you keep essentially writing that story. So maybe then you're going to say like the rain fell all day. And I sat inside feeling lonely or I don't know. That's a little too basic, but, like, you'll get what I'm saying. You keep building the story in the verse. And the verse kind of usually wants, like a story that you're telling, this cohesive. And also some imagery, you know. Where is the story taking place? Who are the characters in the story? Are you singing to you? Are you singing about I? Are you singing about they? What are you singing about? Who are you singing about? Where is it taking place? Try to give the listener this information. Try to try to paint a whole picture for them. And maybe throughout writing this, then you eventually find a really cool lyric. And maybe then you land on, like, the theme of this song might be like, Blurry Dream, which is actually the title of a different song of mine. But maybe you end up saying the whole relationship was a blurry dream, and it's hazy, and you barely remember it now. And you're just left with this feeling. So you could say, Okay, maybe Blurry Dream is the title. And then Everything that you write can try and, like, lean into that title. So then you might go. Last week, you called me. Told me, you don't want to see me. And I said, that's fine. 'cause it's been a long time and I barely remember what we used to be cause it's some blood tree. Now, we were blood Tree Mm And then maybe it goes to a second verse or something. If you're actually writing this song, you might be like, the Oh Oh, sounded better than the blurry dream part. No writing a masterpiece, exactly, but I want to show you we have two different melodies. We have a theme. We have sort of a story that we're telling. The lyrics and probably should be logical. It's up to you. Some people like more abstract or metaphors or whatever. I tend to find that the lyrics are somewhat logical, they tend to flow And then there's some kind of theme that we're building to. There's a songwriting technique that Ed Sheeran uses a lot, and country music uses a lot, where it's like, whatever the title of the song, the main words, like, everything in the lyrics are building. And then they say the main word at the end of the orse is like the ultimate payoff punch line type thing. There's a lot of ways to write lyrics. There's a lot of different strategies. But once you start emoting on your instrument and you start finding some melodies and you start finding some words, you can refine and refine and refine. Once the words are written down, it's easier to keep finding better versions of your verse, better versions of your lyrics, you're like, Okay, I wrote the song, and it works. And then you're like, Okay, now we're going back to the second verse and oh, that's a little bit cooler, and that's a little bit better. The way that I approach songwriting is, I like to get the whole thing done. So I will get a V one done with the best lyrics that I can at the time, and then I kind of go back and improve them and make them better and better and better. But I have a songwriting partner who He likes to get everything perfect, and everything as best as he can every step of the way. So it takes a long time to get through the first verse because he's making sure that it's like this really kind of perfect verse before we move on. And there's a lot of merit to working that way, too, and there's no right or wrong way that you want to go about this. For some reason, I really like capturing all the melodies and figuring out the big picture first and then zooming in. But you can go zoomed in and work your way down. And the benefits of that is that you know exactly where you are, and that informs your next decision maybe better. So there's no right or wrong way to write a song, but eventually you need at least two melodies. You probably want a theme, a general idea or concept for what the lyrics are. And then you want to paint a little bit of a picture for the listener with who are the cast of characters in this story? Where is the story taking place? What's happening in the story? How does it make you feel? What are some metaphors for what it makes you feel or somebody else feel? And give the listener as much information as possible. And the most important thing with writing songs is just just sit at your instrument or just try to write a song every day. Like, give yourself 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Don't spend forever. A short amount of time and just sit down and try to write a song, and you'll get as far as you get. Maybe the first week, every day, you sit down for 10 minutes, and you just sit down and You just play a chord, and nothing comes. That's fine. If you keep sitting down and keep holding to this goal of writing a song, eventually it'll start coming. And it's kind of like a muscle. So if you've never ever done push ups ever or ever even worked out your arms in your whole life, it's going to take a long time before you can kind of do some push ups and lift some weights or something. But eventually, if you keep doing it, you'll be able to do five, ten, 20, 30. You know, I'll keep going. Songwriting works exactly the same way. You just get better and better, the muscle gets stronger and stronger, and don't be discouraged if nothing comes at first. If you keep trying, I promise you songs will start flowing. 10. Beat First: Lay the Groundwork for Your Track: Other camp for writing a song is Beat first or instrumental first. So if you want to write the music first, I'll show you how that's done. There are different camps within writing the Beat first. You could start with the harmony, which I think is the most common. You could start with the drums. You could start with the bass, which I don't think I've ever done, and I don't think I've ever been in a session where anybody else has done that, but, like, why not? There's no wrong way to do it? And you can play in these parts, you can program these parts, or you can find a loop or sample the parts. We're going to go ahead and explore each of those different versions. I'm just gonna play you a beat that I made that we then wrote a song too. M So here we have a beat, and then me and my friend wrote a song to it. So Beat first is really that simple. You just kind of write your beat, and then you rif out some melodies, concepts, lyrics, whatever on top of that. And there you have your song. So Beat first is the most common way that people write music today. A lot of sessions are producers making a beat together, and then the top line writers come in, the singer songwriters come in, and there are maybe a few of them in a room together, riffing out different song ideas, and hopefully by the end of the session, some magic happened, and everybody leaves the room with an amazing song. Now we're going to explore some different options of doing the Harmony first, the drums first, and how to start making your beats. 11. Writing Top Line: Captivating Hooks and Melodies: You're writing Beat first, then you might have some music, and then you have some music. You got to write your song onto the music. So let's explore writing some top lines. Here is a beat that I made. And I was riffing out some melodies with a friend and kept coming up with this melody that was like, da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. And so we started riffing out what that might be, and eventually, we got some words. So, we might have this part here, and we started writing some lyrics. I don't ena. And we found different lyrics that were working here. Down in pa. Swi toxin in the sun. O. And we started crafting a little bit of a story. We had this melody. And then Anna was, like, a cool sounding end word. So we just started trying to find words that ended with that vowel sound because we liked how that sounded in this melody. And I don't know who said it first, but one of us just started doing this. She said I don't even a. So what we have here is now two melodies. We have this, like, I don't even Wa. And then we also have this sweet dv. And we started building this song this way. And we have a little bit of a story that carries through, and then we go back to the sweet divine part. And then we have another melody that came in over here. B Ss What was she waiting for? We know the alley just below C piece of a silent wa loading a apple, eating an apple, chewing it to the co Cading in some cat with the, what does she have int? She said I don't even want to. And we start building the song, these different melodies come through, and before you know it, we have a song. So writing top line really is just listening to your beat and just riffing out some ideas. And you'll keep finding parts that want to come back and maybe multiple parts that want to come back. And this, like, sweet. Da da, sweet. And that eventually became the core concept of the song. Sweet Devine was like, Oh, that's kind of a cool title. Like, I don't know what my friend was even thinking when he said that, but I like that. You know? So it's like, Okay, Sweet Devine, and that becomes the title. Then everything we're writing is trying to lyrically sort of lead there or lean into that concept. And we have a variety of different melodies that stack up to each other that sound nice together, and then we have repeating parts, we have verse parts, and we have the story that we're building. So writing topline is a lot like writing a song just to you playing some chords on the piano or guitar or whatever, but you're writing to the beat. And it's kind of nice to write to the beat because the beats like done. You know, I mean, of course, you can change it, but the beat is a lot of vibe that's already together. And so you can lean into that vibe even more as a singer songwriter. So that's why a lot of people like to write to a beat. 12. Harmony First: Building Rich Sonic Foundations: You want to make a beat first, and then you want to write some topline to it. Well, where are you going to start with your beat? Let's try the most common way for me, which is harmony first. Harmony first, you start with one harmony part. Try to make that one part as interesting as you can. Dally, it's a riff or melody outlining a chord pattern, but anything that gives you some emotion is the right answer. There are no rules. You can have more than one harmony part. But simple is usually better. You can play it, program it, or sample. Then add drums, bass, or sound effects. Analyze play and recreate your favorite harmony parts to help you understand. Okay, what are the songs that you really like? If you really love Fred again, what does he do? Try to recreate some of those songs. Try to understand what makes his harmony parts work. And that can help you understand how to make music like that. In my case, let's look at this song that I made that started from a guitar riff. So I had this little guitar riff that I kept playing over and over, and I really liked it, and I wanted to turn it into a song. So, I really like how that guitar sounds. And that was like, Okay, I was playing that and I was like, Okay, that's cool. That's cool. That's kind of fast, pump. And like, maybe that ones, like, a house beat or something. So this is how I started this beat. I tried this guitar, and then I started to add some drums. Then I found a bassline. Then I actually added a piano. So now I have this guitar part, and I have a beat and I have a piano and I have a bassine. So I have all the elements that I need for a beat, and I could start writing a song to this. But I wanted to lay out this beat just a little bit more specifically. So we started with the guitar, we added the drums, we have the bass. And then for this part, I cut the guitar out when everything else came in, 'cause it seemed like a lot. I took a lot of nature texture in this song, which is just a b. So that's an example of some harmony first beats that I made. So it's basically, I started with a guitar. I had that harmony part. You could start maybe with the synth part that you're programming. It doesn't matter or even a loop. Then I add some drums, then I add some bass, and then I maybe add a second harmony part if it calls for it or not. So that's essentially what Harmony first is. You just find a sample, a loop, or something to play on an instrument or something that calls your ear. That's like, Yeah, that's cool. Now let's add some more elements to it, and then eventually you would add a song on top of that if you wanted to. So that's an example of Harmony first. M. 15. Panning: Expand Your Sonic Horizons: This lesson is all about panic. The general philosophy with panning and music is that nothing should be in the exact same place. It sort of comes from the idea of picturing a band on stage, and each band member is in their own location on that stage. So you don't have the bass player is not standing on top of the drummer. There's everyone's in their own space. We like to carry that ethos into music production just to make sure that all our elements have their own space because we do have the stereo space to play with. A general rule of thumb is that high end can be panned wider and low end wants to be more center. There are really no rules, but that's just a general way to think about things if you don't even know where to being said, the center of the song, zero, not pant at all. That's the prime real estate, because that's going to be equal volume in the left and right. So because that's such an important place, there are a few important elements that fight for that center location. And that is the kick snare, lead vocal, base, and the sub. So these elements like to be in the middle. Maybe you'll pan the kick and snare one to one side, one degree, in the base to the other side, one degree. But sometimes you may want to keep all of these elements in the dead center, and that's okay. The sub, however, you really always want that to be dead center because it's very disorienting, having the sub being louder on one side than the other. Usually, this is true with the kick and bass as well, but moving the kick or bass one to the left or right isn't going to ruin anything. The easiest way that most people start thinking about panning is listening to the old school beatle records because they'll notice that all of the vocals are in one ear. You'll notice that with those old Beatles songs. You're like, Wow, they're only singing in the right ear, and then I hear the drums in the left ear or That was because of their limitations they had with the technology at the time, but that sounds pretty cool, and maybe you want to bring some of that back into your music. But generally, we do like our vocals in the center. So here we have an example track, and let's go and explore the panning. So let's listen to these drums. We have this kick drum here, and we're panting it one to the left. Then we have our snare, which we're keeping at the center. Now we have our high hats. We're panting those to the left. 20. Next, we have our clap, which we're panting to the right. We have a tambourine, and we're panting that to the left. So right now, everything has its unique place. We have a base, which is being panned one to the right, opposite the kick. The kick is one to the left, the base is one to the right. Now we have a piano, which is being panned seven to the right. So, now we're going to turn on our vocals. Muscle Conti. The harmonies are panned 25 the right. Hi 25 to the left. And so are the doubles with the main vocal in the dead center, and then our ad libs are panning they're automating the 30 to the left, and this goes basically 30 to the right, less, and then back to 30 to the right. Muscle no. We've avisa Naviso. We've been talking all night with the Tagore G to turn down the ad. Nothing in M Co. We Livia Naso. Generally, in your beats, you want your panning to look something like that with no element really in the same place, except for the argument of, well, the center, and might want the sub and the vocal, whatever, whatever. Mostly, you want your elements panned into different places. And as you saw, we had our high hats were panned the furest, and then the other elements were panned closer. Don't tend to go crazy with my panting, but some people have the philosophy of, well, you can pan things left and right all the way. Why not pant things all the way? And that's fair. So there's no real right or wrong way to do it. Panting is most apparent in headphones, and you don't want to pan like your main piano part all the way to the right, probably leaving none of it in the left. If the beat is built around a certain element, you probably want that like somewhere near the range just so that it's heard in both ears. But maybe not. It's really a subjective choice. If you can't tell what you want with panting, I would just keep most things basically in the center, but, like, give everything at least its own space by one or two degrees. And then as you get more comfortable producing, you'll start understanding what you like to do and how far you like to push your panting. 16. Doubling and Layering: Add Depth and Texture: Talked a little bit about doubling and layering, and we've certainly explored doubling and layering when it comes to vocals. But you can use this technique for all elements in music production. You want to double and layer things for interest for mph or the Jenicka. You just want to add something new to your song, and you can try doubling or layering some parts. It's common practice to layer your snares. You can double your guitar parts, you can layer your synth parts with different synths. You can really double any part. There's this thing called phasing. So Sometimes you can't just Apple D Windows D duplicate a existing track. Sometimes and often most of the time, that doesn't work because of the way that sound works, it is a little confusing and hard to explain, but if you have the exact same waves, they will sort of cancel each other out and phase each other out. That's why you can't just have the one vocal and literally duplicate the track and have two vocals. It Unfortunately, it does not really work that way. If you have to do that, you can offset the timing of both of them, is a little bit of a hack, but I don't recommend. One really cool trick you can do is to wide pan hard left and hard right, a doubled part. So let's dive into some double and laying. Here we have a beat I made, which has a guitar part. I have one take is all the way to the right. Other take is all the way to the left. This leaves a lot of room in the middle for everything else. So not only are we doubling our guitar part to make the part sound a little thicker and more powerful. We're able to panic hard left and hard right, which leaves all of the room in the middle for every other element in the song. And this is a really cool technique. If your harmony parts hard left and hard right, then you can have your vocal in the center, pan your drums a little bit this way, your base a little bit that way, and you have a very full spectrum experience for the listener. So, this is a really cool trick to use. So let's go to this beat here. And let's layer our harmony heart with this sn. This is different synth. A new layer. Even a new layer. Even a new layer. What we're doing here is we're layering this exact mite part with different sounds in different octaves. And we're layering different textures and kinds of sounds so that we have this dreamy ethereal that fills up space with this sort of more bell like plucky sound with this super plucky sound. And together, we're getting this unique, very full feeling layer. So you can experiment with doubling and layering your parts in order to maybe pan one hard left and hard right, to create space, to make your part a little thicker. You can just keep doubling your synths and your pano parts because that's easy. You just copy and paste a new track, and then you see how that sounds on a different sounding synth. And you can really take that as far as you want to. And eventually, yeah, you're going to detail the volume, and sure sometimes, it's better to stop while you're ahead and you're like, I got two layers that sound good, and the third layer, maybe it sounds a little messy. You don't want that. So always be honest with yourself of does it sound better with this thing? Am I making it an improvement? Am I just layering just a layer? But it's cool to experiment and try different things to see what really does sound best. Remember, you can layer your different snare hits. You can layer your kick drums. You can double your vocals. You could layer different bases as long as you don't have, like a muddy low end. So if you wanted to layer bases, I would I would recommend having one that's, like, actually the base feeling instrument, and then layer maybe just the top end of different bases. So that's really up to you. But layering really adds a dimension to your song. And remember, you can layer things differently throughout the progression of your song. So maybe the first part starts out not very layered, and by the last chorus, it's super layered. That's a great way to go about things. You're like, Okay, each new section of your song maybe has a new layer or something like that. So there's lot of right ways to do it, and I'm excited for you to start exploring layering in your music. 17. Orchestrating: Compose with Confidence: Orchestration is the concept of taking your beat the small part of your song and your beat and really expanding on it, and turning it into a whole world, a whole universe, you're orchestrating, you're composing, you're enhancing, and really whatever part of the story you're trying to tell, you're trying to tell it as well as you possibly can. So let's explore orchestration. Orchestrating can mean adding and layering in new parts and instruments. At what point do you want to have another harmony part? At what point do you want to add a new instrument? You maybe want to add a new instrument in a new range in the chorus to help the sonic quality evolve. You're like, Oh, there's now a high end thing that wasn't there in the verse. You can add maybe a new synth in a build part. Maybe you're going to replace an existing sound in a new section. And the chain smokers did this in one of their big hit songs, which we will explore. You can layer existing sounds with new sounds playing in different ranges, giving the effect that the part is growing. As always, study your favorite songs. How do they layer in new parts? How do they keep their existing parts interesting? So let's dive in. So here we have this beat. Then maybe we have these drums. Then maybe the bass and the kick drums come in. Maybe the vocals would also come in here. Maybe this is the first chorus, and then this is verse. And now that we've heard this for 8 bars, maybe we added a new sound. As a layer. Hand in its unique place. And now this chorus maybe has a new layer and a new range. And a new part. So this is pretty common for the chorus to be the bigger part of the song. And then maybe after the chorus, we added the new rains, so we're hearing that same riff, but it keeps growing, giving the song the feeling that is growing, and we added a new part, which is this continuous arpeggio part, which added a little bit of tension. And then maybe we would break down to something like this for the second verse. And then maybe some more layers come in for this part. And you could keep that going and keep growing layering and taking parts out to try to make your whole song interesting. Remember, with orchestration, maybe you want to do the modern layering style where you just like copy and paste the middy as it is. Or maybe you do want to go ahead and be a little bit more intentional, and you're like, Okay, now that we found our layers, You're like, I want to be intentional about this. Our base notes are playing some notes here. We have the melody version of our chords. The top. And really, I like this piano, but we only needed to play the missing note. To make a chord only needs three notes. So this is the same midi information. But the bass is playing these notes. The pianos playing those notes, and the Bell synth is playing the top part. Here we're getting a lot of mileage out of our harmony. Each part is only being played once, so every single part is super important here. This is nice and very clean, or sometimes you do just want this kind of a sound. It just depends subjectively on what you're going for. So, remember, we are orchestrating this by master minding. Okay, we're going to start with just the piano. And then we're gonna come in with the drums. And then we're going to come in with the bass and all of the drums and the vocal. Hi. Then we go to a second verse that we haven't written yet. Then for this pre chore, we're layering a little more. And then for the second chorus. The mass live so his. We go this part and this part. S tell me And then wherever your song wants to go from there. So, you can start seeing how music really does live linearly. It goes on. It doesn't exist in loop form. And I encourage you not to spend too much time in a loop. As soon as you've got something that's groven, turn off loop mode and start growing your song along the timeline because naturally, you'll know, Okay, we're a little sick of hearing this, and then you change it immediately. And then you're like, Okay, now I want this part to layer. You'll know what feels right in the moment. And usually what feels right is to add something in or take something away after it's been about four or 8 bars. If you just have no clue, change something every 8 bars, and you're like, Okay, every 8 bars, we're either adding something or taking something away. And if it's been a while since you've taken something away, if all you've been doing is adding, then go through a section where you take everything away. And if all you've been doing is taking things away, then maybe you want to add something back in. And you can keep adding in new instruments, or you can go that post malone approach, where it was really the same instruments, but they just kept basically taking out the drums and bringing them back. And that was enough to keep things interesting. So you don't need to overcomplicate it. You don't need seven different synth layers. You really just don't. You could just have one synth and you're like, that sounds What we're going to do is we're going to bring in the base, bring out the bas, bring in the drums, bring out the drums. We're going to take that synth up in octave, down in octave. There's a lot of variation and contrast that can be done all over the place. But orchestrating is when you get in the mindset of starting to imagine the big picture of your song. And as with everything, listen to your favorite songs and figure out what are they doing? When are they layering? How are they layering? How are they keeping you interested throughout the whole song? And through studying your favorite songs, you will find all the answers on how to write your own original music. 18. Counter Melody: Enhance Your Melodic Flow: This lesson is all about counter melodies. So let's talk about what is a counter melody. A counter melody is basically you're adding a new sound or an existing sound that's playing a simple melody that does not distract, but harmonizes well with the main melody. Usually, in the second verse of a pop song. It's a good way to add interest without adding too much. In case just layering and layering just isn't right for your song. You're like, Hmm. Maybe for the second verse, you just want to do a simple guitar melody that's not distracting from your lead vocal, but is making the song grow. Counter melodies are more popular in some genres than others, but I would argue if you really wanted to, you could probably find a counter melody for any song that you're working on. So, let's explore what our counter melody might be. Miss Citi miso. Been talking all night with the tao telling me why stuff that must. This is a really simple part, but it harmonizes well with the existing elements, and it's not distracting from your vocal. So this would be a good counter melody. Nothing in Co. So high Naso. Talking on night with the tago So this is something that might come in the second time you hear this part. You don't need this part. Nothing in M Co. W high Naso. Talking night with the tag. Tell. But it's nice. On a second run through. Nothing in M Con. So high Novasol. I'm talking all night with the tags tell Counter melodies are the kinds of things that you might not even notice on a first listen through because your focus is still on the lead vocal or the lead part or whatever as it should be. But it's there to really just add that next level of interest, and maybe you didn't hear it, but it's there making you listen to the lead part in a new way, harmonizing it in a new way. And then you might notice it on a second listen through or a third, and you're like, Oh, whoa, I didn't even realize they're like adding a whole counter melody to this part. The best counter melodies are super supporting roles. They're the lowest priority. They're not trying to stand out. They're just there to add a little bit of extra, so the song feels like it's growing. 19. Making Sections Sound Full: Maximize Your Mix: Making section sound full. Fullness is a really important part in a lot of music, because there's usually a time in your song where you just wanted to take over and feel really full, whether it's the drop of your song or the chorus of your song. So let's explore how you might do that. Easiest ways to fill up the frequency rags. You have your subs, your bass, your mids, your highs and your extra highs, boom, full harmonic sequence. So that is one way to make things sound full. Another thing that makes things sound full is the low mids. If the low mids are very present in your song, it has this very full sound. So sometimes base and sub together, base living in those low mids can really create a fullness to your song. Contrast can also make things sound full, you add something bright in your chorus, or you add something bright in your chorus or you drop the base in a different section, that can make things sound full by contrast of what came before. O bviously, you can add layers to make things sound full. You can add sound effects. You can have an impact or crash on a section to make it sound full. Study your favorite songs and identify how do they make their section sound full? In which way are they growing them? Is it the contrast? Is there a crash on a section? What is happening in their songs that sound full? And you'd be surprised some songs are a lot more broken down that still feel full than you might think. So this is the classic way. This is just big chords in a full spectrum. So let's listen to this. It sounds like a movie score, like a villain and a James Bond movie or something. So let's see what's going on here. Well, we have these really big chords, and they're big. They span many, many octaves. A lot of repeating notes here. So we have a D down here in the base region. We have another D in octave above, and Finite A. So right now we're playing D minor. Next, we're playing another D above here, and E, so it's kind of a add two chord. We're doubling our A note. We're doubling our D again. We have another E, so we're doubling the second. We have another F, so we're doubling the third, and we have another D. So this is just a big layer of all the same notes that just sounded good to me when I was playing it on the piano and I think maybe I programmed some. So you can kind of layer chords on top of each other Because a D minor is D F&A, doesn't mean you need to stop there. Try D FNA, try it up an octave, try it up three octaves. Move some notes around, experiment with having the D up here and not having the A in the middle. You can just experiment and do what sounds good to you, but eventually, you can end up with these big chords. This by itself, sounds pretty full. It's just a full sounding orchestra, but we didn't stop there. We also added a layer of brass doing the same chords. We added a lower layer of brass doing the base. And we added another layer of strings doing just the high part. It's almost piercingly high when it's alone. So altogether, we have a very full sounding piece of music. Let's explore a very different style of music that still has a fullness to it. So this one we're achieving by really filling up that low mid range. So let me isolate the piano track, which is the main star of that range. So here's our piano. And this is feeling that C two to C three rags, which really makes things sound full. So we're using that range plus contrast to make this section sound full in a completely different way than the last example. I set down in nature and. That in nature so I saw Oh that You might not describe this as sounding full, but there's no sonic holes. It feels totally full enough, and that's not even on your mind, because there's nothing that's lacking in this beat. So what we're doing here is we have these drums. And we have our bass with a sub. We have our piano. And we layer in this guitar even. And we have this texture. So we have the low chords on the piano. We have a full drum beat. We do some texture just to fill some other sound, and we have a higher guitar part that's contrasting the range. This sounds full just because we have all the different ranges covered. And it leaves space to add some more, which we do later in the song. Nature, everything is change. The nature things change. Nature, everything is change. The nature is change. Nature. This has all the elements of before, except for in addition, we have these high strings now. And together. Oh. So, these are different ways that you can go about making section sound full. And depending on the genre you're going for, one way might be more appealing than the other. You can do the layering the big chords and the really full sound, or you can just be like, You know what? I know the chords I want to play. I'm going to have this piano, this guitar is going to come in, bass and drums, and that's all I need. And the more I produce, the more seasoned of a producer that I become, I tend towards the second example. I tend towards finding less parts to make something sound full, but there's no wrong way to do it. So whatever sounds best to you and whatever feels best for your song is always going to be the right answer. A 20. Voicing Chord Inversions on Piano: Unlock Harmonic Possibilities: Let's talk about chord voicings. You can change your inversions throughout the song to keep the song growing and evolving and staying interesting. You can try the choir voicing. You can layer in new inversions onto existing sounds. You have different sounds that play different notes of your chord, and you can experiment with what sounds best to you. Different voicings, have different emotions and feelings, full, empty, haunting, powerful. Honestly, powerful usually comes from chords being more dense. So what you're going for will help direct you down the right road. Let's go ahead and listen to these chords. This is the standard root position. Now, let's experiment with some choral voicing. Is are the same chords. But what we did, we grabbed the second note and the fourth note, and we jumped it up and oct, which I'm doing with shift. And this has now a different sound, more open. A. So, another way we could do this is we could just take all the lowest notes and bring them up inctave. This is a new inversion. We could try that again. We could try it even again. And we could move all these cords up or down in octave. You can click in the empty space, command A, shift arrow down. A general rule of thumb is the lower that you go, the more space between your notes you usually want. Having something like this, two nose right next to each other in this low range might not sound the best. It's okay, but it is a little muddy. With a four note chord, you can organize them well having the root in the base, the third, the fifth, or the seventh or whatever the fourth note is. Those are basically your options if you want to keep them all close together. When you start opening up the chords and you're like, Well, this second note here could go up an octave, suddenly you have a lot more options, and you're like, Okay, let's just have the third an octave, and let's keep the other note in the same place. Or maybe let's take the fifth and let's move that one up in Octave. A good thing to keep in mind if you're just going down inversions after inversions and you're like, Well, I don't know what I'm even looking for. It's try to create a good melody with the top notes. Try to create something that's interesting. So all of these notes in these chords are different basically. So whichever one you pick will probably be not a bad choice, but some chord progressions have a lot of similar notes, in which case, if you're playing something like this, there's a note in common here. So if you had that note up top, It has a certain feeling to it. And maybe you want that, maybe you don't. But if you don't know what you're looking for, I would tend to have the top note be changing. Of course, there are absolutely really no rules, so you just kind of do whatever you want to do, but it's helpful to have certain things to keep in mind, at least when you are not sure what you're looking for. It's going to move these epinocta again. And now we can move this whole down. You can have the chords start by being lower at the beginning of the song and then open up throughout the song. So maybe in the first verse, it starts out here. And then by the chorus, it opens up to here. And then maybe it goes smaller again for the verse. That was a really simple way to create some cool contrast without adding really anything at all. We're just changing the inversions of the same notes that we're already playing. So that was a very easy way to create some chains and contrast in songs. Once you've found your chord progression, spend a little bit of time finding the right inversions for your chords because I find that certain inversions to sound a little juicier than others, but it's always within the specific context of your song. It's nice sometimes when the thirds are up top But that's really up to you to decide what sounds best in your case. And I urge you just to take 5 minutes and see, are there some better sounding inversions of the chords you already have? Or maybe the way you had it was perfect, and then you just leave it alone. Of course, you can grow them and evolve them over time, and I suggest that you try that because that keeps the song sounding interesting. 21. Sections Want to Grow: Evolving Your Song's Story: Sections of your song want to grow over time. Like, you don't really want to hear the exact same chorus twice. Yes, you do want to hear the chorus twice because it's probably an engaging piece of music or it's Casi, or it's fun. But it's nice if it can have some changes to it. Something different, so you're like a reason for it to exist a second time. Don't just think structurally, Well, it has to be A B, A B. So we got to do it twice, give it a reason to exist, give it, earn that second repeat. It's not just a copy paste. There's something unique about it. So let's go ahead and explore making your sections grow over time. Here we have a song that we wrote for a short film, and it starts with this verse. Fresh. L a dry her. She Why like vanilla Iice cream. Clean now's a plain white tea. Let's cold gate tea. We go to the second half of the verse. Strong. Now we go to the Wilds open the cold gate to your wildest stream. Hop on the negle Now you're smiling with me. I'm Johnny Cold Day. Yeah, your wild in this street. So we're doing a repeat of the chorus, and what's happening here is that there's this high vocal that starts coming into the second part, this call and response. So we're evolving this chorus over time. We then go to a second verse. Red like some color gray. Ramping up for a second chorus. Strong like a damn viper D in the cool days. To your stream round. And that chorus has the vocal. The main vocal is up and octave. So there's already some difference there. There's a lot more energy. And we added some background choir going Oh. So you can tell the difference of this chorus. To this chorus. A your loud. The drums also go a little bit harder in the second chorus. So that's really giving this a reason to exist and exciting to listen to because you know that the second time you hear the chorus is going to feel even more exciting. And that's basically what you want. So let's listen to a song of an old band of mine uro and we'll listen to the song one. A nice. Well, I'll come my cup. That's nice. Skip ahead to this chorus. Yeah, I come. Ten. So. I've been kicking here we go. It's not to show. Feels like something's missing. You already know. That's O B twice been kicking. Show. Amy come in. Eels like something's missing. Mi a came in. You already know. Now we'll sip ahead to the second chorus. A nice nice. Second char. That's twice. Kick in. Hi synths show. And the fast drum part. Heels like sting. You already know. As Ow pick in. Now coming. Heels like something's missing. You know. The newest song comes in. So I'm just showing you different examples of parts growing throughout the song. So the first chorus hits, and you hear the lyrics, you hear the vocals, and it's full, but it's not like just exploding out of the song. And then by the time the second or third chorus comes, a lot of new parts are there, and we have new layers. So really gives it a reason to exist. You have to earn your repeating parts. But yes, you do probably want to repeat your chorus. It's a good puzzle to solve. It's a good challenge to have. And just start linearly. You start somewhere. Probably sounds pretty good without too much, and then you can just grow and grow and grow as you go on. It should be a natural process. And once you start making your own beats, I bet you'll start doing this intuitively. 22. Stay Zoomed Out: Great piece of advice that a very talented producer friend of mine gave me is to stay zoomed out. So in this lesson, I'm just going to be talking about what that means. You really want to do the details last. You want to stay flexible in case you need to slightly rewrite your base part halfway through producing. If you've really gone all in, just designing and processing and everything, it's going to be harder for you, even just intellectually to get yourself to go there because the amount of change you're going to have to do is more. So you want to be able to stay flexible throughout the production process. Can be discouraging spending forever tweaking the fourth snare hit only to realize that you need to reimagine your whole drum part. Follow your intuition because a lot of times for me, I have this feeling, I need to change this part, and I don't, and I don't. And then I get to the end of the song, and I'm like, Oh, I really have to change this part. So listen to your intuition. You don't always have to change everything, and sometimes there's deadlines and deadlines are healthy and all this stuff. But you know, spend that extra five or 10 minutes to see if you can get a slightly better part. At the beginning is usually always worth it. This is all to say, don't be too precious. Experiment, try different things. Save As as your friend. Song should work without the details. There's no amount of detailing and tweaking that will save a bad song. This is really important to remember that if the song doesn't feel magical just with some chords and some melodies, then you probably want to find different chords and different melodies. If you're doing the song first approach, you just always want to have the song in mind, and that's easy to do because it already exists, and you only really want to add things that enhance the storytelling of the song. So you're Okay, what really is necessary? Start with just the bare bones of adding what do you really need? And from there, you can start embellishing and making things shine a little more and show off your production shops, but you always just want to keep things simple at first so you can stay flexible if you need to change one part or something. So if you're playing in a tempt drum part and attempt base part, and in doing that, you started tweaking your drums a whole bunch, and then you suddenly realize, O h, man, like, you went the wrong approach with your drums. You need to change the sounds. You need to change the pattern. It's harder to get myself to do that when I've put a lot of time into it. So I try to put in all the detailing and the time as late in the process as I can, so I'm the most confident and the most sure that I do have my parts locked down. The perfect drum fill and the perfect base fill can usually wait a little bit, and it's probably not going to be make or break if you have those right away. But of course, if you have some really great idea, I mean, get your idea out for sure. I'm not saying don't explore those ideas. You're not sure where to put your energy, it's still worth getting your base part recorded before you finalize the absolute perfect, detailed drum field. It's important to keep in mind where you're coming from, because maybe you're going to start working on a build and you make your build so big that it overpowers the drop. And suddenly, your drop just doesn't feel right coming from such a big build. So sometimes you have to stay in that zoomed out way where you're like, Okay, we're going to build, but I know kind of what my drop is going to be. Because the drop isn't going to be this huge bang and crazy full thing, we need to keep that in mind when we're doing the build so that we don't do a build that has the full frequency spectrum to do a drop that is empty, but not in a cool contrasting way. So that's why staying zoomed out can be good. If you're like, I know my chorus won't be super huge. Therefore, we have to go even smaller for the verse. And so the big picture helps us make good decisions along the way. Loop mode can be deceiving because maybe you'll be in loop mode. And you're looping your chorus. And this weird thing happens in loop mode where you're like, Oh, I think I can add more, and I think I can add more, and you start adding more and more and more and more and more because you've been looping. So you're used to hearing what's already there, and you start adding and adding and adding. And then when you come back and play it for somebody else, it's like, way too much just hits them all at once. I'm like, Whoa, you have a lot of things coming in there, because you were looping then and getting used to what you're hearing and slowly layering versus when you listen to it out of loop mode, it just all hits you right at once. So be careful working in loop mode because I have done that many times where I've just added too much. I've overproduced, and like, then it doesn't even sound good or even make sense in context when you're not hearing it being built slowly in loop mode. So just keep that in mind. 23. The 3 Second Rule: Talk about the three second rule. Now, the three second rule should probably just take care of itself if you've done all the parts, how they're supposed to be. If you have your drums and they have a cool little pill, and you have your bass, and it has a fill in a different place, and then you have your armony part, this playing a cool riff, and then you have your vocal that's singing in its own pocket. The three second rule should probably take care of itself. But what it is is saying, basically, every 3 seconds, there should be a new sound, something like coming in. This doesn't mean a a new sound into your song that wasn't there before. It just means that, like throughout listening to the song, basically every 3 seconds, like, the riff walked down, and then the baseline came up, and then the drum fill happened, and then the vocal happened, you're continuously handing off the attention to a different part in a really organic way. Now, when I first heard this, it really stressed me out. That seems crazy, like every 3 seconds, like, how am I going to do that? So Don't worry about the three second rule really. It's like this sort of general thing you can, keep in the back of your mind, but don't like stress about it. You like, Oh, my God, 3 seconds went by and I didn't add a new thing. That's not helpful, and not at all the point of this. If you've made all your parts, this should probably take care of itself. And it's just kind of a guiding reminder if you're not sure. You know what? L, maybe maybe it doesn't need a little drum fill. You know, Maybe your drum beats like getting a little sale. It's kind of the same thing, just looping and looping. This is what it's meant for. Remind you. Oh, you might need a little pizzazz moment here and there or the vocal drops out, and nothing came into that pocket. It's just to remind you that wherever there's a free space, you don't need to fill it a silence is great, but you can have these standout moments. The vocal dips down. There's nothing happening, the drum beats cruising. Maybe you do like a little guitar part jumps in or not. You know, you don't have to, but it's just there to remind you that your song is a continuously evolving thing, and there can be lots of different standout moments. 24. Don't Overproduce: Some words of wisdom are do not overproduce. So we're going to show some examples and experiment with what does overproducing sound like? Don't drown your song in production, tips, and tricks. Don't drown your song in sound effects and layers. Take breaks. Perspective goes a long way with music. Loop mode can be deceptive. So be careful. Your song doesn't work with drums, bass, one or two harmony parts and a lead, then you probably just need to write a better song. No amount of endless tweaking and layering is going to save your song if it just doesn't sound good in sketch form. If the core idea isn't strong enough, you need to find a better core idea. There's a saying of putting lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig. I love pigs, but this is just a saying just to show you, like, you can't dress something up and think it's a different thing. It's still what it is. So your core idea is what it is, and if you need to change it, you need to change it, and if it's perfect, it's perfect. I mean, we love pigs, so there's nothing wrong with that. The listener can really only focus on 2.5 things at a time. Somebody who is mixing, I think it was fading Private Ryan. It was a war movie was overwhelmed with the amount of sound that came in, and the mixer was like, Wait. There's 1 billion explosions and shouts and gunfire. They recorded so much, and he had no idea where to start. So they did a study, and they realized that somebody can only focus on 2.5 things at a time. And those focus points can change. But he just went through and had just 2.5 things up on every fader and just kept pulling things in and out of the attention span, because that's all we can focus on. So there's no point in having too many sounds that we can't even perceive all at once. So let's go ahead and listen to what overproducing might sound like. L et's say we have this beat. And we're in loop mode. It sounds good. And we're like, we're feeling this, but it's a loop mode, and maybe we want to add a little bit more. And that's fine. So that sounds cool. Yeah, that sounds good, right? And then we're gonna add another loop. Ooh. That sounds good. And maybe you want to add another lout. Okay. I don't want to hear that one too much. What about another one? Oh. That sounds good. Another one? Oh. Crazy. Maybe another one. And you're like, Okay, let's keep this train going. Ooh. Nice by coming through. Yeah, this sounds really good. Nice. And you're like, really feeling this, and this sounds great. And then you go back and listen to the song. You're like, Okay, this gonna be a banger. And you're so excited for your 20 drum parts that are about to come in. And it's kind of a lot. And you're like, Well, I don't know. And then you're like, Well, it didn't quite sound as good that time. It kind of just sounded a little bit messy, and you're like, W, well, let's try it without all those drums, and see how that sounds. You're like, Well, maybe, maybe just a little bit of that, you know? So, obviously, there was something about what I was adding that I liked. There was something about it. So maybe it wants to be somewhere in between having some of the layers versus just the broken down version. But goes to show when you're in loop mode, you start getting into this crazy space and layering and layering, and then you listen to it, and you're like, Oh, that's just a little much. So it's important to keep in mind that, yeah, okay, if something is calling me, the drums aren't popping quite enough, and I do want to layer it, go ahead and layer it, but you don't need 20 layers, probably, you know, So try to find the one or two layers that are really doing what you are looking for in your song. 25. Builds: Create Tension and Anticipation: This lesson is all about builds. So let's dive right into builds. Builds come in all different genres, shapes, and sizes. So this song is a kind of Indie song, but it does have a build, so let's go ahead and listen to this. So we have this breakdown section. Tell me out, tell me outside. No the drums come in. Tell me, Tell me upside drums come in. And the buff target So that was a pretty subdued build, but it worked. Basically, a build is supposed to rise the energy up, and this got more exciting as it went through, and we rose the energy into the drop. This is an example. What we did here is we have the drums start coming in slowly. And then this drum was coming in. And then we have this fill. We also have this pad here. And the pad didn't really change throughout this. So, this dreamy guitar was really something that was rising up, acting as a riser. Oh So that is really effectively the thing that was rising. And that paired with the drum slowly coming in, ultimately leading into that drum fill, is what gave us that impulse of energy that really feels like a build leading into our drop. So let's listen to it again. Tomo Tomo Tomo Tomo So that's one example of a build. And that one's pretty simple. Let's go explore some other build examples. So, here we have another song, and we're gonna study the build of that song. To me. Now Do what to Do what you want to me. No. To what you need to need Yeah. Go the breakdown. The main thing is the sins. We have some rain. New sin comes in. The sound is opening up. More epic. Do you want to me. Transcener. So, this build was achieved mostly through this sound growing over time. So let's go ahead and listen to it. The synth here. La with that synth there. This is the one that's really growing. We have this sound. And we can see the automation. We're opening up to filter. It's getting brighter. And because this filter is opening up and getting brighter, that's what's giving this rising feeling. Do you want to me. Let's go ahead and look at one more example. Here is another example of a build. The synth is the main thing here. A come in. Snare hit. A b. So peggio comes in a big sweet goma. So So there's a lot of different elements to this build, and the main thing that's rising in this one is sweet. We are adding this arpeggio. Which helps add some movement and speed, and we have a little drum fill here, and a little drum fill here. And as you'll notice with a lot of these builds, I don't like to build straight into the down beat. I don't like to build right here. I like to stop the build a little bit before, usually on the snare hit that would go before the beat so that there's a pause. 'cause it's really cool to like rise the energy, pause and then drop. I tend to prefer that. So you'll notice this build stops halfway through the bar before the drop. So let's pay attention to that. Got me Emma. So, that's what was working about this. We have that pegiator coming in. We have the rising sweep, and the rising sweep stops along with everything else stops right before the drop comes in, and we have that solo vocal line. So that's a nice trick to do. Especially if you do have that Cats phrase vocal line that you can put right in the pocket. That's nice. Energy builds, main vocal part comes in, and then it drops. Of course, there are 1 million ways to do builds. There's 1 million right ways to do it. Each song will have its own thing that it calls for. But in general, you want to have something rising up. The classic EDM build was a kick drum going like, da da da then it drops. So we've heard that a lot of times. We're not hearing that as much anymore just because we kind of overdid it, but certainly by increasing rhythm, especially that increases tension, of course, that's going to feel like a build. And that still totally works. You can have rising sounds feel like builds, increasing tempos feel like builds, increasing fullness can feel like a build. So just getting something that is rising the energy and increasing momentum will feel like a build, which is what you want when you want to rise the tension. The more subdued and slower your song is, the less you'll have to do to make that feeling feel like it's building. The faster and more complicated and full your song is, the more you're going to have to do to make it feel like it's building. So wherever you're coming from, the contrast of building will grow on that. So I encourage you to experiment with these different build styles and find what fits your song the best. 26. Drops: Energetic & Euphoric Release: L et's talk about drops. So we'll listen to the end of this build here. Gamma. Go This goes into a groove section which starts building again. So Let's explore a little bit what's going on here. So we have this build that stops half a measure before the drop. And then we have a kick drum, and it's a pretty big sounding kick drum. It's actually a layer of two different kick drums because we really wanted it to have some power. We have the snare. We have our eight oh eight. So this is really pretty sparse. We just have some big sounding drums and a full base, and then we have the synth here. And the key is that the volume of these sounds is just loud enough in comparison to the build where it still has a big impact. The concept behind this drop is that it's a little bit more broken down and going from a full sounding build to an empty sounding drop, but it can't actually feel empty. You were noticing the contrast, and that's creating some excitement. But these sounds are still compared to all of these sounds. You got me, ma. So If I were to make the build louder, the drop would be very disappointing. So we have this build. Good, you want to me. Transcend Omni President So what we have going on in this drop? We have a very full build, which then immediately contrasts with just a synth line. So this is a few sins layered and a sub. And together, That Transcend. We have this. Hits in here. We have our vocal Transcendent sn We have this synth. We have a little bit of a riser into the kick. So we're adding a little bit of energy into the kick drum coming in, and we're adding some space. So sounds that have a little bit of impact, but also a lot of reverb space to open up the dimension of the song. Our big kick drum. So this is starting to build again. It's kind of like a build into a which then the main payoff is really here. And that's just because we have the rest of our drums kicking in. So we have some by snare layers, some snappy snare layers, and altogether, this is creating the payoff moment of our drop. Straw. It's like it kind of keeps doing So we have another point here where it's going to sec up. Existing synth line get And with everything, you want your drop to really be pretty loud in comparison. Of course, you can't have everything being as loud as possible, but this synth is pretty loud. Come. Do you want. The space is good. This synth here, you need to make sure that the build isn't too loud in comparison, because the bill can overpower something like that. So the hack that we use to allow our builds to feel big and loud and our drops to feel big and loud is this space in between so that there's not a direct comparison in volume, that the ear will notice, the space, something else comes in, and then a new sound comes in. This allows us to cheat the volume of the build a little louder than we could if we were going straight from the build into the drop. So, in addition to adding some tension into the mix here with that pause, that anticipation. We're also allowing ourselves to get a little bit more volume out of the different parts. I'll show you one more example. Here we have two different drops of this song. We'll explore this build. So, this build here is really a full drop out from the beat. Pause. So it's pretty easy for something to sound impressive after something that's so empty like this. We really just have this piano. And this riser. And then we get to the next part. So let's explore, and then we get to the drop. So let's explore what's going on here. We have this kick snare. So different layers on the snare. And in our cymbals loop, we have some music going on. This is pretty uncommon, but I found a loop that had something in the sound of it that I really like. I had layer, sub face. Piano. That sounds like this. Just creates a longingness in the background. We have this. Have these effects. So essentially, we have this impact on the downbeat with these effects. We have this that's more prevalent on the downbeat. We have the piano that hits on the downbeat. We have the bass that hits on the downbeat. We have the kicked on that hits on the downbeat. So from this space here, a lot hits right on this downbeat, which is very exciting. Let's go explore the second drop over here. We have this focus shot that's looping. This car dro litter building. And now, we have a very similar drop to the first time. And you can notice how the first time it was really more of a contrast. It was from empty to full, which sounds more impressive, but it's also more jarring. This one builds a little more seamlessly into itself, which also has a really good payoff feeling. This has a lot of the same elements. Kick. Snares. I have drops come in all different shapes and sizes, and there's no one way to do a drop. But you can start seeing some themes that for that moment to really hit you, contrast is cool. We explored a really full build to a more empty drop, and we explored a really empty build to a really full drop. And with everything, You just want to design your song so that the drop really is the impressive moment that you want. And this can mean a lot of different things. This can mean that the volume of the build is a lot quieter than the volume of the drop. Even though you might just have a kick and stare in a base, if you turn down the volume of your build, the drop is really going to stand out. Of course, you can make your drop stand out so much that it seems out of place in jarring, and that's not something you want. And I tend to like a more even keel to the music, and I want the builds to feel impressive also. But there's lots of little techniques you can do. You can slowly high pass the build as it's going to get rid of the low frequencies so that when the drop hits, all the low frequencies come out and sounds more impressive. I heard Odessa say that they will bring in the stereo width of the build as it goes up with a utility because the utility has that knob, where you can control how wide it is, zero being mono, 100% being stereo. So you can start automating that down so that the build is getting thinner. You could also start high passing the build and low passing the build, so the build keeps getting smaller. And then when the drop hits, it'll be even bigger contrast. It depends what you're going for. But taking the time to really make your drop a standout moment will always be worth it. 27. Reference Songs: Lesson is all about reference song. So let's talk about what a reference song is. A reference song is something you have in mind, something you're going for. You're like, I like this vibe. I want to write something in this style. It's even better if you have multiple reference songs, maybe from different genres, and you're like, I want to do the drums of this 80s song with maybe the guitar of this more modern song or whatever you're looking for. You can start combining genres of doing maybe like modern dance drums with a more old school 80 synth? That's a very common thing I'm hearing these days. And having a guiding compass can help everybody you're collaborating with know what they're going for as well. Because sometimes in music, it's hard to communicate the feeling of something. Oh, you want it to feel epic, or what does that mean to you? Is that orchestral epic or is that synth epic? Is that like folk epic? What does it mean to you? Having reference songs is good, and especially when you're referencing how good is your song. You know, when do you stop? How bang into your drums need to be? Use reference songs to help you understand what world does your song live in and help you know when to stop. When is it good enough? When are you going maybe too far in a certain direction? So reference songs are so helpful. Let me show you a reference song I was using and the song I was using it for. I really like this artist, and I really like this song, and I wanted to write something in this fib. You. So, this was my reference, and I was like, I like this five. Let's try to write something in this five. So I tried to match my drums to be in a similar world. So we started here. I My kick drum ax is a different sound than there. So this is where I strayed away and went into my own direction. But you can hear the similarities. We have it's heavy on the percussion. They got some really wet snaps, and you can start hearing how this beat came inspired from that other beat. We even had a pad. So far, similar elements, similar tempo, similar group. Their baseline was pretty sparse. My bassine is a little bit more full, but here's the bass. I can listen to how does my beat sound compared to their song. Through using that as a reference, I can be like, Oh, okay, like, my beat maybe is a little bit too aggressive, and I want more of that lead back feel. Or I'm like, You know what? I like that I'm doing something a little bit different. My song exists in a similar world. It sounds similar to this. And that's really the main point. It helps you know what kinds of drum sounds to look for, what kinds of pad sounds to look for. What is the range of the pad? What is the rags of these instruments? What is the bass sound going to sound like? Is it playing super low high notes. Referencing and going back and forth helps you anchor what you're doing. Especially if you're producing for other artists and you're producing for clients, and it's not your own inspiration that's directing you where you want to go. It's even more important that they provide you with reference songs. So you know where you're headed because you could say that these drums are bang it. But somebody else was expecting more of a David Guetta super high energy house beat. And this has nothing to do with that. So without the reference song, you could be talking about completely different worlds. And with the reference song, you can tell, Okay, Yeah, my song, I want it to be like this vibe, and it sounds pretty good compared to that vibe. In the end, I ended up making a different feeling song because I brought in a new element, which was this guitar. It with you can listen. So what started with one reference, ended up meeting some of my other musical tendencies, and I combined it with some other references of mine and some other songs, and I got something unique. But I started this comparing it to the feel your weight song to give me a good reference point of what I was going for. Like I said, it's even more important to have references when you're working with other people because then you can both know sort of what you're talking about. And I wrote this song with a dear friend of mine, and together, we were like, Okay, going for this. How is our drumbeat sound? Do we need more percussion? Do we need a snap thing? What is it about the Reference song that we like? And we found the pad and we're like, Okay, now this is like creating the same vibe. And suddenly, when your song is doing the parts of the reference song that you like, that's when you can sort of fly free and you're like, Okay, now that we've got the vibe that we were both going for, What else can we add or what can we do this unique? We don't want to rip them off. We want to do our own thing. And you'll find most of the time, even though you're using a reference song, you naturally just do kind of your own thing because you won't have the exact same sounds, probably, and you won't have the exact same chords and everything. And just by referencing something, you end up creating something new and unique anyways. 28. Vision is Key: Vision is key. And what that means is having a guiding compass for your song is really going to be what saves you and pulls you through to the finish line. A reference song can be that if that's what you need or just a different kind of vision, but having an idea or a goal in mind is so important in the vast endless world of music production because there's endless possibilities. You can do absolutely anything. So without having A goal in mind, sometimes you can get lost in the ethers. Having a vision for your track is a great way to keep you from getting lost in the woods. Who is the song for? In what environment will it be listen? What are some good reference songs for this vision? If you already know what you're going for, then you'll know when you've arrived there. You'll know when you've achieved your goal. If you don't have a vision, that's okay. Sometimes it can come later. I don't always have a vision in mind, but it's very, very helpful to do so. Having a vision is important because you can have any kind of drum sounds you want. There's 1 million different kick drum sounds and stair sounds. So it's like you want some rock drums? You want some folk drums, you want hip hop drums. You want dance drums, house drums. If you don't know what you're going for, you won't know what choices to make. So you're like, Okay, I want to make a house song, so we're not going to have some rock and roll drums. You know? Unless you're specifically trying to cross genres, which I always recommend trying. You're like, Okay, we know sort of what drum sounds we want to go for. An emotion can be your guiding compass. You're like, You know what? I want to dance song, but I want it to feel nostalgic. So that can be your guide compass. You're like, Okay, until I have that feeling, I know that I'm not quite there yet. An interesting thing that Kendrick Lamar for one of his albums was he brought all the producers together in a room and played a whole bunch of reference songs. So they were listening to a lot of earth wind and fire and some other old songs from the 70s to really get all the producers and songwriters in the right mood of Okay, we're doing this kind of incorporating this older sound into modern rap music, and it's going to be this really cool fusion of a sound. So getting all the collaborators on the same page that way, having a listening party, just soaking up the same vibe. Okay, what is the vibe they're going for? Soaking everything up, really helps everybody on your team know what you're going for. And even if you're alone, it's important to have a vision. Let's say you're just starting out and your vision isn't clear, I bet you probably do have a vision. I bet you know the kind of music that you like and that you want to. And that's helpful because it's like, Okay, you like rap music, you want to make rap music. So you're listening to rap music, you talk about rap music. You listen to your friends who maybe make some rap music, and you're like, Okay, that's your goal. You're making a rap song. Easy. You know exactly what your goal is. Now, all you have to do is take the steps to get there or you want to make a dance song or a pop song or an indie song or whatever it is. Whatever you like is probably your vision, even if it's not totally a conscious thought yet. 29. Basics of Mixing Part 1: This lesson, we're going to talk about mixing. We're going to talk about the basics of mixing, and I'll explain to you what it is. Basically, will you produce your song, then mixing is the final layer, the final gloss that just makes everything sound more cohesive, more together, and it's the last little bit to make your song sound professional. So let's dive right in. Act of mixing is to make your song sound good or sound competitive within the genre. To make sure that no one part is stepping on another part. It's to find balance within all the elements in your song. This is the area where you're going to do the final fine tuning, and it's where you make your song sound competitive. Mixing can take you pretty far down the rabbit hole, but we're gonna just stick with the most basic and essential parts that can get your songs sounding professional. So the most important thing of mixing is volume. Gains staging. We've talked about this before, but it is the single most important part. Then comes EQ, compression, panning, delay, reverb, sweetening, and a waves C six. Let's dive into this example beat. In this beat, we have a breakdown section like this part like this. Here with the whole groove and then this part. This is a pretty simple beat. But as you can see, this section here is where we have the most information. So it makes sense to start mixing where the song is most full. If you have a regular commercial like pop type song, you might want to start mixing the chorus. If you have a dance track, you might want to start mixing the drop. You basically want to mix the most important part of the song, make sure that part sounds as good as possible, and then you make all the other parts. Yes, sound as good as you can, but also support the part that you're trying to make shine the brightest. So What is mixing? Like I said, the most important part of mixing is to get the volume right. So let's listen to this. And for the sake of this exercise, let's just turn off the plug ins that I have here because these plug ins were me doing some mixing prior to this, and I want to do everything from scratch right here. Okay. So, let's listen to this. So, like I said, the most important part is volume. So when you just play your beat, you want to see if you hear everything, how you want to hear it. Can you hear the guitar? Can you hear the drums? Each drum. Can you hear the bass? K. And that basically sounds pretty good. I could maybe hear these snare drums a little louder. But I think in general, it sounds pretty good. So maybe let's just take these snare drums up one D B. So what I might do here is group the snares together so that I only have to do one move here instead of moving both of these in volume. So let's see if this sounds better. That sounds pretty good. I could also maybe hear our base a bit louder. So this is our base track here. And maybe we'll just go here and turn it up one V. We'll notice that we are distorting there. So turning this up, even though I wanted to hear this ladder, we're going to have to find another way to get the bass ladder because that was distorting, and we don't want it to distort. So now we basically have the volume of all the different elements in our song, more or less where we want them. But we remember that we do want to find another way to get this bass louder. The next thing I would do was pull out some EQs. So let's go over here to the EQ eight, and let's start with this guitar. Notice how I will sometimes work in solo and add elements. I, I tend to solo the most important element. And it's good to work in solo sometimes, but remember that your mix is always how everything sounds together, so don't stay in solo for too long. We can see that there's really no low end information below this point. So let's just cut it off. A quick tip. I usually do cut off the low end of absolutely every single element in the song, except for the kick drum and the bass to leave all of this room for the kick and the bass to really cut through. What does it sound like if we go like this? Still sounds pretty good. We'll tend to high pass everything around 100. You don't really want to change the sound because we like how it sounds. So I would set this right around here. Next, I'll go and grab some dynamics here. And you see that I already had this guitar controlled dynamics. And because this was a guitar, I went for the glue compressor here because the glue compressor has a kind of vintage sound, and guitars are analog are real thing. So I thought that would be a good combination. And we're not compressing this much. Let's show just to show you. You can see it sounds more free without this compressor. But I like that this makes it a little bit more contained in the mix here. Now, let's go to our kick drum. Our kick drum and our base are in the same channel, which arguably is not the best idea, but it is what we've built here, so we're going to stick with it. So as you can see, we have a base here, and we have a kick. Layer. What I did was I high passed the kick because I wanted all the room possible for the base. You can see how much the base cuts through now. It's so much cleaner because the low end information is not competing with itself. We can see that I even high passed the base, which that might seem counter intuitive. But what we're doing here is you can see the base hits right here. And really, there's no reason to have anything lower because this is what the sound that we want to hear. And when you cut away all the excess sound, you really focus the sound on exactly where you want to hear it. We are distorting a little bit, though, so we're going to have to take this down. So this is sounding pretty good. But because we were running into this distortion problem, I'm actually going to duplicate this track. And this is going to be the kick track, and this is going to be the base. So in this track, I'm going to mute our base. And in this track, I'm going to mute our kick. So we couldn't bring up the volume there, but we can bring up the volume here, or at least I hope so. Notice how this was distorting, this is not. So this was the better way to turn up the base. Do we even want it louder? Depends what you're going for. It depends now, I think the genre that you want would depend on how loud you want this base. So that's why referencing is important, but we'll talk about that in a second. Hi. 30. Basics of Mixing Part 2: We eque our kick, but I kind of want to add some compression just to really glue it in place. Let's start with this acoustic kick compressor. You can see how this is cutting through a little bit better now. And that sounds pretty good for now. We're going to leave this base uncompressed because I tend to like my subbases and my eta weights uncompressed. It's the only element in a song that I will leave uncompressed. Let's go to these snares, and remember, we can treat them together, and I want to do an EQ on their snare track as well. 'Cause we don't need any of this information down here. That sounds pretty good. This says soft snare compressor. Let's see what that sounds like. That actually sounds pretty good. Let's turn this even more down. A. That sounds really good. Okay. Now, let's do an EQ and a compressor for our high hat. We can get rid of a lot of the high hat information. And it still sounds like a high hat. Can we like this? Sometimes you have to set something and you come back to it. But I'm really not missing anything that's gone. And in general, like, if you don't miss it, just have less information competing with itself. So let's go and see what compressor we might want to use here. Could you try this gentle squeeze. Lastly, we have our shout, and I turned this filter delay off just to show you what it would sound like. Clearly, we like this sound. This probably wants something like this. I like this sound being a little bit more full, but let's see if it leads all this high end. It's nice to take down the high end a little bit, maybe. I mean, that sounds good. That's very subtle. You can go either way on that one. Now, let's try to sustain lead vocal compressor. Aaa. I like it. So now that you have things a little bit more contained and living better together with some EQ and compression, let's talk about panic a little bit. So panning In a mix, you never really want everything to be in the same place, and you really don't want anything to be in the same place. The middle or zero, right here, the S for center. That is the golden place of real estate. That is the king of the Crop. That's the most powerful place because it is equal volume everywhere. Left, right, middle. So here, you want to put your most important element. You want to have your kick drum, your snare, your bass, and your lead vocal or lead sound. Those are the only things that should ever live in the middle. This is a pretty simple song. And it's nice when you don't have all of those important elements living in the middle. So let's just move the kick one to the left, excuse me, the right. We'll move the base one to the left. Moving the base or kick one is okay, but you really don't want to move these elements any further than that. This will keep our snare in the middle. As far as our high hats, We can get away with that. And our guitar. Our guitar is really our main element, and cemetery is kind of nice, so maybe we'll pull in the high. And now we have our shout track. That pans on its own. But maybe let's just move it to the left. Now we can talk about reverb. So snare tracks tend to have their own dedicated reverb. So let's go and look for a snare reverb. We see that there is a snare preset that could be good. A wooden room could be good. Dark room could be good. Drum room could be good. Let's turn off the options and audition really quick. And when trying a reverb, send it all the way so you can really hear what you're listening to. That's something? That might be more in line. That was really hard to hear. That is not so bad. I didn't really like the first one. Listen to this last one. So for this track, I would maybe pick this wooden room. And like we had discussed before, we will E Q going in with this point at 300 and this point at 7,000 And now we'll pull down. Because I like this drier sound here. Let's see what else might want some reverb. We have our high hats. Ba Ba. And Maybe our guitar wants rever, perhaps. I actually didn't realize our room rever was so big. A. So, do we like the idea of reverb on our guitar? There's something kind of nice about that label this snare. But that's really too. So, what if instead, we put it into a delay? That's still not really working, and I kind of preferred this reverb sound. So, let's take this reverb. Let's copy this EQ here. And let's just experiment making the reverb a little bit smaller. K. Now let's take down the send. Another way you could do this, which is not the right way to do this, but there's no wrong way to do it. Send it all the way and just turn it down here. So that down to -15 is similar to this. A. 31. Basics of Mixing Part 3: Now it's time for some sweetening. What can we do to make this just sound a little bit better? This is a great time to go to your drive and color. Let's try this saturator here on the base, and we'll try a bit warmer. We'll try warm up lows. That makes a huge difference. I said warm up blows, accidentally drag warm up highs. Let's listen. That sounds really good, but that turned the volume of our base up. Turn the soft. Here's actually better with it off. Now, let's turn the base down a little bit to compensate. Maybe one more. Well, maybe I liked it. What else could we maybe do? I might want to also throw some color on our guitar. If there's a compressor involved, you probably want the distortion before the compressor. A Fav. That sounds pretty nice. And notice that there's a lot of turning on and off the effect that you just put on to make sure you like how it sounds. I also want to add maybe some distortion or something to our kick drum. So let's try one of these maybe. A. A. I like how that sounds, but it's getting a little bit aggressive with this top. So maybe we will go to this multi band dynamics here and just compress the top end of our kick a little bit. And let's make it around here. A. A. That sounds pretty good. Maybe we also want to compress our high hats in a similar way. Oh, here we can see we're distorting a little bit. Maybe that's what's going on with. I like how this is sounding more contained and honestly a little bit quieter. Hay down. So this is sounding pretty good. You can go and maybe add some pitch modulation, try some chorusing, maybe. War ensemble on the guitar. Let's see how that sounds. That's not really the vibe for this song. Let's turn it way down. That's just a quick mix of this beat that I was doing, just to show you what my process is like. The process is iterative. And honestly, sometimes you sit down and every move you make is the right one and you just get on the right train, if you will, and all your decisions snowball into something you like. And sometimes you sit down and you go the wrong way. And that's okay. And when you step back, export your song, listen to it in your headphones, go for a walk, come back, and listen to your reference tracks. We'll go over that in a sec. And sometimes you realize, you know what, it sounded better before, and you just scrap that and restart. And that's totally, totally fine. Don't feel like because you put effort into mixing something, you have to use that version of it. Every decision you make is informed by every decision you make. So how you start building your house of your mix, if you start on a shaky foundation or it wasn't the right foundation, and you build the rest of your house on that. Sometimes you'll find you need to completely restart. And that is totally fine. That's happened to be so many times. But a lot of the time, you'll sit down and you'll nail it, you'll get pretty close, and you'll be really happy with what you did. So on the next lesson, we'll talk a little bit more about mixing and we'll talk about mastering. 32. Basics of Mastering Part 1: So you've produced your song, you've mixed your song. Now the final final touch is called Mastering. Let's jump right into mastering. Now, the basics of mastering, it's the final touch. It's the end. It's the last thing you're going to do. It's to make your song sound good on all devices. Because if you think about it, people listen to music on AirPods, people listen to music in cars, people listen to music in clubs, people listen to music on computer speakers on iPhone speakers. All of those speakers have different capabilities of reproducing sound. There's no base on iPhone speakers, but you still want your song to sound as good as it can. On an iPhone speaker and in the club. So basically, mastering is trying to make your song sound good everywhere. You can do Stem mastering or single track mastering. You want to hit about minus six or minus three on the master bus. And then I have my list of favorite mastering plug ins that are third party, but you can also use Ableton to master with Ableton Native Plugin. Here we have a mix of mine, and let's turn off my mastering chain and listen to what we're working with here. And with you can So this song, this makes, to me, sounds pretty good, and I am feeling like it's time to get my mastering on. So this is my mastering chain, and this is what I like to use. First, I have this SSL comp by Waves, and I use these exact settings. These settings make it so the compressor is an amar working. But it is working just a little bit, and this SSL just gives the whole track a glue. That's the best way I can describe it. Next, we have Ozone. And Ozone has this mastering assistant button that you click, and it will use AI to give your song an initial starting place for the Mastering. And honestly, that gets it about 90% of the way there. It created this EQ chain because it saw that I had too much base and I didn't have enough high myths. Next, we had some dynamic e Qs because it decided that these specific points were a little much sometimes. What the dynamic e Q is is whenever this point is being triggered too much, it pulls it down, but whenever it's not, it is knocking down. We have this imager, which is something that I add. It gives your song some width. Next, I love to use Saturn, and it has this magic mastering preset, which really just does some wonders to the low end. Like, I can't even explain. Finally, we have the master limitter, which is also from Ozone. Although you can use any master limitter, this is my favorite one. These settings are probably not going to be right for your song necessarily. They really change drastically per song, but you use the mastering assistant to get you 90% of the way there, and then you can tweak the threshold a little bit from there. So I made sure that my mix was hitting about minus six or minus three, and then I put my mastering chain on, and here we have my mastered finished song. And you can side in the heat. So it's really important when we are mastering to use reference songs. And you can just reference a song by A Bing from Spotify. I have this plug in here called Reference, where I can drag songs in from anywhere, and I will buy something on I tunes, and then I put it in this reference songs folder, and then I can pull these reference songs into my session. Let's just grab whatever is here. This random Billy las song, this random Polo and Pan song. And we'll call that good. Now we have two songs in our reference, and what it does is that one a is Now we're hearing, Billy. Now we're hearing. Now we're hearing. Sometime. And what you want to do is just saying, like, Okay, yes, the songs are going to sound different. But do they sound competitive? Does my song sound in the same world as Billy Ish? And you're like, Okay, my song actually sounds a little bit louder. That's totally fine. Side. It sounds pretty close to Canopy as far as Cope as far as the brightness and the overall levels of everything. So because my song is sounding competitive with some other songs, I know that I've done a good job mixing and mastering. I use those third party plug ins because those are the best in the game, but I want to show you how you can use some mastering plug ins that are native to Ableton. 33. Basics of Mastering Part 2: You can put your mastering chain on your song in the original file. Maybe you have a file where you have a production session, then you do a save as for a mixing session. Then you do a save ads for a mastering session. That could be a good way to work. You could print your mix into stems, which is what I personally like to do. And then you would end up with something that sounds like this. And then you're ready for mastering, pull up a new clean session where however many layers made up these stems, you printed them down until, like, six, and that's really easy to work with. You could also just export your whole mix as one and just master that. That also works as well. Now, Ableton here, if you go to audio effects, and then you go to utilities, and you go to audio effect racks, has some mixing and mastering presets that can really help you start. There's a lot of different things going on here, and I definitely recommend that you explore all of these. Some are just for the drum bus, some for like a channel strip. Like you'll create a group of all the guitars or a group of all the drums, and you put these on. These are like, sort of mixing level things pre mastering. For this song in particular, I found these plug ins here that I thought sounded pretty good. And so we can audition them here. Side. That's no mastering here is master wide and warm. Side. That instantly gives us some more umph. We have stereo enhanced. Side. We have Master EQ and glue. Full s. And we have Master full chain. Full s. That maybe sounds the best to me. So let's look at what is mastering. Mastering, like you saw in my third party chain, or in these chains, it's a little bit of EQ compression and some limiting. That's basically what mastering is. It's like, Okay, your song has the bass that you wanted, and it has the drums that you wanted and everything that you wanted. And how In the end of all things. Do you just need a little bit more bass? You know? Like, compared to other songs? Do you just need, like you like how your kick is sitting with your base and your seven and all this stuff, like, Altogether, I just want to globally boost the low end, or I just want to globally boost the high end. This is where you do that. You can do those EQ moves by ear, but just be gentle. Don't go ham If you're having to boost things like 20 dB or something, like, you just got to go back to your mixing. These should be subtle last finishing touches. But you can tell each of these chains have some EQ going on. A lot of them have also some compression. This has the most complicated one because we're also adding some distortion, which is a pretty bold move. The other thing you'll see that all of them have is this master limit. Honestly, the limitter, the master limitter is the most important part. If you have nothing else, you want a master limitter. So this is not a complete mastering chain because it does not have a limitor. And to use this, you would definitely want to add a limiter here. Why is a master limitor so important? Is because nothing gets past the ceiling of a limitor. It's like a super compressor. And that just means no part of your song is going to jump out of nowhere and blow the speaker. If you are unlimited, you do risk blowing speakers if you're playing live or something. Probably not gonna happen, but it could. So the master limiter is super important to protect the speakers, but it also just glues your song together. So, as with everything, you do it by ear, I thought that this sounded the best side. So I would probably use this setting here. This is maybe moving a little too much. So I would even decrease the attack more to have this meal just bumping a little bit here. Old sign. And I don't know if it needs six. Maybe it does. That's really kind of up to you. Click six, and you can see how much we're going to be adding here. It's one DB of gain. So You know, it's sort of up to you. The distortion it looks like is off. That makes a lot more sense because, like, distorting the master bus you can do, but it is, like, a little it's bol. So H, we have our master winder really doing that much, pull it down a little more. That's way too much. In the cool sign. Turn off in the go. That sounds pretty good. So if I were using the Ableton plug ins, I would maybe go with this chain. You can obviously go in and add some more effects to this one right here with stereo enhanced seems kind of interesting. So maybe we'll turn this on. Turn off because we already are adding EQs and glue compressors and limiters. We don't need to go way too had, Let's go ahead and turn on the stereo enhanced and just hear what that sounds like. Cool sign. That sounds pretty nice. So I would probably pick something around this chain mixed with adding this stereo enhanced. Remember, I turned all these other things off 'cause I just wanted the stereo enhanced quality of this chain here. So, that's what mastering is. It's that final final touch. It's that glue that holds your song together, and it's really, like, your song is not going to sound quite competitive and quite finished until it's mastered. And when it is boom, you have a finished professional sounding song. 34. Learning Activity Make Your Masterpiece: Congratulations. You've made it to the end of the arranging and producing chapter. As you may have guessed, the learning activity for this chapter is for you to go out and make your own song. Make it from scratch. It can be song first, it can be beat first. You can do harmony first, drums first, bass first, whatever you want. But go and make an original piece of music. Feel free to rewatch any of the lessons for any of the specific stages you're at to help really remember what are all the different parts? Because when you're making a song, there's a lot of stuff to remember, and you're not going to remember everything all the time when you're making every song. And that's totally k. A lot of this stuff is intuitive. Don't worry about did you remember all the different parts of production, and don't get to in your head about it. You just want to always remember? Does it make you feel good? Does it make you feel sad? Does it make you feel how you want it to make you feel? That's always the most important thing. But go ahead and make your own song. Don't spend more than an hour on production. Don't spend more than 30 minutes writing the melodies and the lyrics. Don't spend more than 30 minutes mixing and mastering. Set time limits for yourself to you don't work on music just endlessly. I will work on a song for a month, sometimes, and I will take a long time to work on something, but I also will work on things very quickly. And it's important to get in the habit of working quickly because you don't want to get too precious with your ideas. And at the end of the day, the more music you make, the better you will be. So making a new beat every day for seven days will make you a better producer than working on the same beat every day for seven days. Even though at the end, you might end up with a better beat that you worked on for seven days versus a new beat every day. It depends on what you're going for. Are you trying to get your chops up? Are you trying to get better at making music? Or are you in your masterpiece stage and you're like, Okay, let's make some thing and release it. Two different things, two different approaches. There's no right or wrong answer. But either way, for this learning activity, I urge you to set a time limit, go ahead and make your own song, and when you hit your time limit, hands off, you're done, and you can always repeat this exercise as much as you want. 35. Congratulations!: Congratulations on finishing this class. I am so proud of you, and I can't wait to listen to your class project. You can say hi to me on Instagram or Spotify at Benza Maman. And if you liked this class, please check out my other music classes on Skillshare.